Women Drivers : Safe Sex

The old jokes about women drivers have long been stale, but they’ve kept coming nonstop anyway. Now maybe a new survey will at least slow them down.

Comics years ago would paint vivid pictures of a white-knuckled husband trying to teach a wide-eyed wife how to parallel park. In recent years, the jokes have become a bit more sophisticated: the smirking remark has been that women should be required during driving tests to simulate real driving conditions--such as applying mascara and lipstick in traffic.

A great woman political leader once said that while women are certainly no worse than men, “whether women are better than men I cannot say.” Well, women now can say they are better when it comes to mastering driving in California.

A Times analysis of nearly 179,000 California driver records during most of the 1980s showed that women generally were much safer drivers than men their age. Sixteen-year-old girls had a violation rate one-quarter that of boys the same age. Although the worst drivers of both sexes tended to be 18-year-olds, it took women until only age 23 to arrive at the statewide accident average--while men didn’t reach that average level until they were in the age 35-39 group.

Could it be that after all this time, we’ve discovered what it is a woman wants? She wants to avoid moving violations and accidents.

Sorry it’s come to down to this, Dr. Freud. But you never had to drive in California.