1. You need to get somewhere fast, and have few inhibitions about scattering pedestrians like pigeons, honking and playing chicken with anyone who dares challenge your ownership of the road.
2. You need to get somewhere in a reasonable period of time, without scaring the daylights out of anyone inside or outside the car, and without making the kids throw up in the back seat.
If you answered Dad to No. 1 and Mom to No. 2, you have bought into a stereotype, the kind of overgeneralization that makes open-minded people squirm. And yet, statistically speaking, you might have a point.
Among the many findings of a city traffic study released on Monday was that 80 percent of all crashes in a five-year period in which pedestrians were seriously injured or killed involved men who were driving. The imbalance is far too great to be explained away by the predominance of men among bus, livery, taxi and delivery drivers, said Seth Solomonow, a spokesman for the city’s Transportation Department.
The statistic would seem to put to rest, for good, the Mars versus Venus question of who is better behind the wheel, and to confirm what auto insurance companies — and at least half the city (women, that is) — knew all along.
“It has to do with our motherly instincts,” said Amy Forgione, 35, a driver for 19 years. Men, she said, feel above the rules. “They feel like they control the road, that they own the road.”
When she drives with her husband, Ms. Forgione said, she buckles her seat belt and holds her breath.
Social scientists and traffic safety experts say that male drivers around the world get into more than their share of bad car crashes, and that the male propensity for aggression and risk taking, fueled by testosterone, is to blame. Men, experts say, are more likely to drink and take drugs while driving, to avoid wearing seat belts, to speed and even to choose a smaller gap to turn through across oncoming traffic.
Yet while it would appear that New York City’s finding destroys the old stereotype of inept women drivers, under all that recklessness, men may still know more about cars and how to handle them, suggested Anne T. McCartt, senior vice president for research at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
The high crash rate for men may be skewed because men account for about 61 percent of the miles driven in the country, though the gap is narrowing, federal highway statistics show. Increased driving adds to both the proficiency of the driver and the risk of getting into an accident, Ms. McCartt said.
“Part of what gets muddled when you talk about gender differences is the skill of driving and risk-taking,” Ms. McCartt said. The bottom line, she said, is that “aggressive driving behavior is a bigger piece of the pie than skill” when it comes to serious crashes. “The evidence is really incontrovertible that men as drivers take more risks,” she said.
The males of the species are not only more dangerous as drivers, they are more likely to be hurt while walking, the city’s study found. More men than women were killed or injured as pedestrians in every age group except among those over 64 (perhaps because women live longer and were overrepresented). Boys 5 to 17 years old ranked first in the absolute number of pedestrian deaths and serious injuries, with 785, more than twice the number of girls in that age range, though elderly people were more vulnerable as a share of the population.
“These patterns are set sort of early,” said Tom Vanderbilt, the author of “Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us).”
“You see a lot more boys killed running into traffic,” he said. This is partly because boys are given more “freedom to roam,” and the culture expects them to take more risks, Mr. Vanderbilt said. “That pattern is set early but continues through every sort of life stage, including driving,” he said.
While the experts seem to consider aggression a bad thing, many male drivers thought it was a strength. “On the road, I think the most important things are intuition and aggressiveness,” said Mark Volinsky, 24, who has been driving for six years. “It’s hard even for me to conjure those up driving around the city, so I can’t imagine someone like my 45-year-old mom being able to function in that kind of dog-eat-dog environment.”
Rose Pinto, 34, a certified driving instructor at Sharkey’s Auto Driving School, was not surprised at the city’s findings. Men are overconfident, and it is their downfall, Ms. Pinto said. “Even if a guy doesn’t know what he’s doing, he’s more inclined to say he does,” she said.
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