Study finds male drivers more likely to die in crash

WASHINGTON – That stereotype about bad female drivers is shattered in a big new traffic analysis: Male drivers have a 77 percent higher risk of dying in a car accident than women, based on miles driven.

And the author of the research says he takes it to heart when he travels – his wife takes the wheel.

“I put a mitt in my mouth and ride shotgun,” said David Gerard, a Carnegie Mellon University researcher who co-authored a major new U.S. road risk analysis.

The study also looked at age, finding that the highway death rate is higher for 82-year-old women than for 16-year-old boys.

The findings are from Traffic STATS, a detailed and searchable new risk analysis of road fatality statistics by Carnegie Mellon for the American Automobile Association. Plans are to make the report public next week, but The Associated Press got an early look.

The analysis calculates that overall, about one death occurs for every 100 million passenger miles traveled. And it shows that some long-held assumptions about safety on U.S. highways don’t gibe with hard numbers. It lists the risk of road death by age, gender, type of vehicle, time of day and geographic region.

“We are finding comparisons that are surprising all the time,” said study co-author Paul Fischbeck, a Carnegie Mellon professor of social and decision sciences.

Fischbeck said men take more risks, speed more, drink and drive more.

“They do stupider things,” said Fischbeck, a former military pilot who has twin toddlers and a “totally unsafe” 1974 Volkswagen Thing.

Fischbeck’s study didn’t get into specific car makes, but found larger vans to be the safest with a death rate less than half the national average for cars. School buses, massive vehicles driven during normally safe hours, have a death rate that is one-50th that of average passenger vehicles.