Risk of death higher for male drivers

WASHINGTON (AP) -- That age-old stereotype about dangerous 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 holds plenty of surprises:
The highway death rate is higher for cautious 82-year-old women than for risk-taking 16-year-old boys.
New England is the safest region for drivers -- despite all those stories about crazy Boston drivers.
The safest passenger is a youngster strapped in a car seat and being driven during morning rush hour.
Numbers don't jibe
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.
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 jibe with hard numbers.
For example, those dangerous 82-year-old women are 60 percent more likely to die on the road than a 16-year-old boy because they are so frail, said Anne McCartt, a research official at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, who was not part of the study.
"It's an issue not of risk-taking behavior, but of fragility," McCartt said.
Drivers aged 40 and 50 tie for the lowest risk of dying in an accident. But if you're a male out at 2 a.m. Saturday on a motorcycle in the South, you may want to take out some more insurance.
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