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I tend to think that everyone on the road is a horrible driver. . . except for me, that is. In reality though, there are a lot of good drivers out there, and they are comprised of both sexes. In general, men tend to be the better drivers for a verity of reasons.

There are few statistics out there that take into account miles driven, accidents, and gender all in the same report. Most often, statistics might tell you which gender had more accidents, but without the context of how much each sex is driving, you really can not use that as an accurate way to tell which sex has less accidents. For example, ten women drive ten miles a day and two of them have an accident. Next, 100 men drive 100 miles and four of them have an accident. This would usually get reported as, "Of the six total accidents, men have 66% of them," which would lead you to falsely believe that men are worse drivers. But, when you look at how many people were driving and how much they were driving, you can actually see that women had a higher chance of having an accident, in this example.

Here is one bit of statistics from the John Hopkins report that actually takes these things into account:

"Overall, men were involved in 5.1 crashes per million miles driven compared to 5.7 crashes for women, despite the fact that on average they drove 74 percent more miles per year than did women." (Epidemiology, June 1998)

This shows us that men drive nearly three times more miles than women, and yet they had about one crash less per every two million miles. Based on that statistic, men are drastically better drivers than women are.

Young men do tend to be much more aggressive drivers than women and older men, but aggressive does not necessarily mean careless. An aggressive driver may be rude, go fast, and get angry, but they may still check all of their mirrors, use signals, make full stops, and generally pay attention to everything around them.

Women, on the other hand, tend to be more careless when they drive. Their attention drifts toward whatever is on their mind or whoever they are talking to. Women also tend to go fast, but they are less likely to pay attention to everything going on around them while driving. They might miss the car that is next to them as they try to change lanes, they don't see the stop sign as they go through the intersection, or they do not notice the car in front of them has its brake lights on. Lack of attention leads to many more accidents than aggression does.

Granted these are generalizations, and not everyone fits into these categories, but, of all drivers, men tend to be better drivers than women. In my opinion, though, there really are very few good drivers out there, men or women, because it seems to me that most everyone on the road needs to improve drastically.

Learn more about this author, David Bowie.
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