« Anyone Want a Poet-Center? | Main | Tag Team » Progress23 Jan 2008 01:43 pm Looks like the government of Saudi Arabia is poised to start letting women drive. I think it's safe to say that the case here is pretty unassailable, though I suppose there's some reason to believe that the public safety gains from a ban on male drivers would be large. Via Jessica Valenti. Comments (27)
the public safety gains from a ban on male drivers would be large. This strikes me as dubious. You might gain something from getting men off the road, but that would be of vanishing significance in light of the massive increase in riots. 
I suppose there's some reason to believe that the public safety gains from a ban on male drivers would be large What reason would that be, do you have any evidence whatsoever to back up this assertion that male drivers are more accident prone? I realize that as someone who grew up in NYC and lives in D.C. you probably don't drive much if you even have a license (and I am not being derogatory, nothing would make me happier than not having to drive ever), but here in the midwest where we have to drive everywhere I don't see any evidence, anecdotal or otherwise, that your statement is true.
"What reason would that be, do you have any evidence whatsoever to back up this assertion that male drivers are more accident prone?" For ages under 25, the statistical evidence of a difference between male and female drivers is enormous. Insurance companies don't charge young men more just to be dicks.
Would banning male drivers lead to public safety gains? I imagine it would lead to increased poverty, which would likely increase violence offsetting any other public safety gains from a lack of males causing vehicular accidents.
I think there's an obvious gain in road safety if male drivers are banned in Saudi Arabia:
The move is designed to forestall campaigns for greater freedom by women Ahh, sweet progress.
Evidence that men are substantially more likely to die in car crashes (from 2006): Pick a year (click submit), choose you variables (person type, age range, etc.). In general you'll see that men are at least twice as likely to be a crash fatality as women (or involved in a fatal crash). http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/QueryTool/QuerySection/SelectYear.aspx The FARS system only tracks fatal crashes.
And then I read that having a penis makes someone an inherent public safety threat on the road. That makes me sad. Surely, there are over-aggressive and excessively cautious drivers of both sexes? Of course. And surely there are some liberals who always take sides with women against men even when wrong, and other liberals who only take sides with women against men when women have been wronged.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that MY doesn't really want to ban men from driving.
Bragan, apparently a lot of those male fatalities are the result of not wearing seat belts. "The people who are not wearing their seat belts are the same people, by and large, who are getting killed," says Jackie Glassman, acting director of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). "That's young men, in pickups and SUVs, on rural roads." http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-05-14-seat-belt-cover_x.htm But I don't doubt that lots of the same young men are also driving recklessly.
Banning males from driving would also help reduce pollution from tailpipe emissions and slow global warming.
Just for the record that FARS database (which is pretty cool) also shows that male drivers outnumber females 2 to 1 and it is not clear to me that the fatality stats adjust for this (they might, but looks more like straight numbers as far as I can tell).
Wow, Matthew, you may have to start adding little /kidding and /snark and /parody tags to your posts, there are some serious folks reading this blog. BTW, I don't think the "d the blogger" really thinks Freemasons actually run the world, either.
DP -- To repeat, the FARS database only contains data from fatal crashes (which is a relatively small segment of crashes). The majority of fatal crashes involve only one vehicle (contrary to what many people may think). The fact that FARS shows that there is a roughly 2:1 ratio of male to female drivers involved in fatal crashes is consistent with the fact that roughly twice as many men as women are killed in fatal crashes.
Ok, point taken, I misinterpreted that. However the question remains as to whether statistics adjusted for the demographics of all drivers would show a similar result.
I don't have a link for you (though the data are out there to be found), but I do know that if you look at crashes involving non-fatal injuries, there are slightly more women than men involved. I don't know how closely that ratio corresponds to the ratio of women to men in the US.
DP and Bragan - Men also drive significantly more miles than women, and I believe that cuts across all ages and demographics.
njorl - That's the first time I've ever seen somebody on this site claim that insurance companies are not doing something just to be dicks.
If you don't realize that women are bad drivers, chatter incessantly, are clueless about sports, and love to shop all humor produced before 1970 must be completely unintelligible to you.
mike -- While I've not seen VMT (vehicle miles traveled) by sex data, it does make sense to me that men as a whole drive more total miles. At the same time, I'm pretty sure they don't drive twice as many miles as women.
I think Matt was making the point that Saudi male drivers are so dangerous already that getting them off the roads would be a marked public safety benefit. BTW, only The Telegraph came up with that story. It remains unconfirmed in any other media, including Saudi media. Either the reporter got it wrong or he's gotten himself a scoop that needs verification.
Excellent news. Now Arabian women can drive their men-folk to the polling station, and they can sit in the driver's seat while they wait - still unable to vote. (Not that a man's "vote" in Saudi Arabia is worth much, anyway).
Of course men are worse drivers than women. Men are also more likely to get into fights, sleep around, abuse drugs, and be generally reckless. This is news? Perhaps only to people who are committed to the ideology that men and women do _not_ have essential differences and that all such differences are the result of 'cultural conditioning'.
Not the funniest Matt post. Keep your pundit job, Matt, Vegas is not for you. Banning both male and female drivers would probably lower the accident rate - unless chimps and the occasional dog are still allowed to drive. I think the FARS data would probably indicate that men are more likely to drive drunk - although Paris, Lindsay and Mischa are trying to reverse that trend.
Way past bedtime for everyone else no doubt ... but almost no one brought up the question of driving patterns in a Middle Eastern or specifically Saudi culture. Wikitravel is certainly not to be considered the last word on any subject, but I'm glad someone else out there confirms what hearsay (from expats who have lived there) has come my way: "By car: Car rental is available, highways are excellent, and gasoline is some of the cheapest in the world. However, there are important reasons to think twice about car rental. Although a fair percentage of Saudi drivers are suicidal, homicidal or insane, the majority of Saudi drivers are all three, and the country has some of the highest accident rates in the world. Accidents are common, and if a visitor is involved in one, they would be exposed to the extremely punitive Saudi legal system; see elsewhere on this page for the warnings about that. " Slightly tongue-in-cheek no doubt, but just sayin' ...
I'm jealous that Matt has a girlfriend who's so easily impressed, but if she ever asks him to put up or shut up will he actually stop driving, voting, and anything else I've missed him suggesting men shouldn't be allowed to do?
Comments closed February 06, 2008. |
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Heads in the Sand
And here I was smugly chuckling that Jonah Goldberg wrote "The White Man is the Jew of Liberal Facism" over at NRO. I thought "C'mon, you paranoid dipshit! That is a silly caricature. Liberals aren't anti-white men, their anti-conservatism."
And then I read that having a penis makes someone an inherent public safety threat on the road. That makes me sad. Surely, there are over-aggressive and excessively cautious drivers of both sexes?
Posted by P | January 23, 2008 2:20 PM