Archive for November 15th, 2008

Quality Planning, whose research shows up a bit in Traffic, has released a new study which shows that “male drivers are cited for reckless driving 3.41 times more than women.”

The data was derived thusly:

“Quality Planning said it analyzed 12 months’ of 2007 policyholder information for U.S. drivers, comparing the number of moving and nonmoving violations for both men and women. Overall, the data shows that men are much more likely to receive a traffic citation than women, and that this difference in driving behavior is consistent across all age groups.”

Men do drive more miles, of course, and I’m not sure if this was corrected for in some way (women may drive recklessly but their exposure is lower, so less chance of being caught; or maybe male traffic cops really are less likely to issue tickets to women — after all, as this study by Michael Makowsky and Thomas Strattman found, “ceteris parabis, young females have the lowest probability of receiving a speeding ticket”), but the gender difference seems much larger in any case than any mileage discrepancy.

Two other points worth noting:

“The resulting accidents caused by men lead to more expensive claims than those caused by women.”

“Women drivers were also about 27 percent less likely than men to be found at fault (1-49 percent negligent) when involved in an accident, according to the company.”

(Tap of the horn to UC-Berkeley’s Traffic Safety Center)

Networks guru Anna Nagurney (my kind host yesterday at Amherst), lends a valuable historical perspective in a letter in the Economist, in response to their article on routing inefficiencies in road networks.

SIR – It may be of interest to your readers to know that it was actually economists who first figured out that an individual’s selfish behaviour when selecting an optimal travel route would yield different traffic flows and times than if one were to assign flows in a centralised manner to try and minimise the cost to society (“Queuing conundrums”, September 13th). Arthur Pigou wrote “The Economics of Welfare” in 1920, by which time he was well aware of the distinction between different traffic behaviours.

Anna Nagurney
Director
Virtual Centre for Supernetworks
Isenberg School of Management
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, Massachusetts”

The last time I was in Berlin, Brian Ladd’s Ghosts of Berlin was my invaluable key to the contested city’s palimpsestual history. I’ve reviewed his new book, Autophobia, in this weekend’s New York Times, and I’ll no doubt be referring to it again here. Review here or after the jump.

(more…)