The biggest piece of non-news being reported last weekend was one of the results of an expansive Carnegie-Mellon study on traffic fatalities, a matrix called Traffic STATS. The statistic being reported is "Male drivers have a 77 percent higher risk of dying in a car accident than women, based on miles driven."
Wow! How interesting!....."I guess all those jokes about women being bad drivers are wrong" is what the copy read on news stations from coast to coast.
There is just one problem.
The analysis only says men die more frequently in car accidents, there is no data on who is involved in more accidents per mile driven. If anything it says that male drivers are more fragile. Also, the statistic reported notes men being "77%" more likely to die. Typically, stats of this sort are a red flag for the discerning viewer. If it read 77 times more likely, that would definitely be significant, but the news producers are banking on you thinking the two imply the same thing (or they don't know the difference themselves, which these days is increasingly more likely).
If they were to actually look at the data from the study before going into print/on air with it, they would have found the numbers showing, per 100 million miles driven, 1.35 male drivers die in traffic accidents, while .78 female drivers do.
Those raw numbers are far less compelling than that lofty 77% figure, wouldn't you say? Especially when the average person will drive fewer than 1 million miles in a lifetime.
1.3 males per 100 million miles driven?
TIme to be responsible guys, turn in those driver's licenses right away.
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