U.S. Highways--Fewer Drunks, More Women : Safety: Roads are becoming safer, but female motorists are found to be younger, more aggressive and more likely to suffer high-speed fatal accidents.

By JOHN BARBOUR

June 28, 1992 12 AM PT

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Strange things are happening to the American driver.

HE is drunk-driving less.

But SHE is driving more aggressively. More and more she is likely to be killed on the road. And although she, too, is driving drunk less, her rate is not dropping as fast as her male counterpart.

The king of the road is getting the message about drinking faster than the queen of the road.

It is a reflection of the times. Young women are driving more often than they used to, and driving more miles. And they are putting more of those miles on the speedometer during high-risk times, nights and weekends.

The often-maligned stereotype of the woman driver of 40 years ago as pokey, indecisive or issuing orders to her husband from the back seat is gone. Her daughter is driving harder and faster than ever before, cutting in and out of traffic and shoehorning her car into lane changes.

Carol Lederhaus Popkin of the Highway Safety Research Center of the University of North Carolina, says, “Young women have different driving patterns than young men. Their crash and violation patterns contain more citations for failure to stop, failure to yield the right of way, and safe movement violations.”

In 1989, Popkin first published her analysis of young women’s road behavior, based on crash and drinking data and motor vehicle violations in North Carolina. Since then she has received a record number of letters from people saying they were shocked at the number of aggressive young women they had seen on the road.

Although female road fatalities are up over the last 10 years, they are still safer drivers than men by a 2-1 margin says Mike Brownlee of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

But, all in all, the American driver is giving up some of the old freedoms of the road in favor of safety.

“What we are seeing is a sea change in the way people view driving,” says Charles Hurley, vice president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. “We are getting away from the word ‘accident,’ which is sort of a luck-fate-magic approach and into the word ‘crashes,’ where people understand what specific things they can do to reduce their risk.

“We know when it happens, where it happens, to whom it happens and why it happens. These aren’t accidents. These are very predictable events. . . . “

In the last 10 years, there has been a trend toward mandatory seat belts and available air bags, anti-lock brakes, designated drivers and second thoughts about how to get home from a favorite bar or restaurant.

For those who have more than one drink an hour before they hit the road, justice is increasingly swift. By the end of the year, when Nebraska begins enforcing the lifting of a driver’s license if the driver exceeds a certain blood alcohol content level, 31 states will have such laws.

Statistics emerging from this melange of laws and regulations are surprising.

Three percent of the drivers on the road are repeat offenders of drunk-driving laws. They account for 14% of alcohol-related fatalities. That’s 5 million people and a lot of jail time.

Of the some 20,000 killed in alcohol-related crashes each year, about 85% were never arrested for driving under the influence. It was the odds, not the law, that caught up with them.

“We may break the 20,000 mark this year,” says Brownlee, associate administrator for Traffic Safety Programs, “and it may be the lowest number since these data have been kept.”

The number of traffic fatalities in 1990--44,529--was the lowest since 1985, in part because the number of men killed while driving drunk was down about 11% since 1982. And preliminary data for 1991 indicate that total fatalities had fallen to 41,150.

From 1982 to 1990 the number of women involved in fatal crashes increased 28%, while the number of female licensed drivers was up only a little over 12%.

Safety experts are struck by the ironies of saving lives. The national 55 m.p.h. speed limit was enacted in 1973 as an emergency measure to save gasoline during the Arab oil embargo. It saved thousands of lives and was made permanent in 1974.

It turned out to be “probably the most effective public health measure” of that time, Hurley says. It resulted in a 17% reduction in fatalities, of which 8% to 9% were the result of lowered speeds, the rest due to a combination of factors, including reduced travel.

“It was extraordinarily effective, if politically unpopular, especially in the Western states,” Hurley says.

Then Congress allowed states to raise the speed limit to 65 m.p.h. in certain rural areas.

“The lives spared by drunk driving, seat belts, car-seat laws for children and now air bags are being undercut by speeding,” Hurley says.

“We are losing some 500 people a year on the rural interstates due to the increase in speed limits to 65. That is about equal to the lives saved by getting all 50 states to enact child-restraint laws and probably the same order of magnitude by getting all 50 states to enact a driving age of 21.

“People have been led to believe that speed is a victimless crime, that every time they break the law, and most people do, and arrive back home safely, that it is due to their exceptional skill as a driver.”

Seat belts are another lifesaver. Although drivers resisted seat belt use, some 39 states and the District of Columbia have enacted seat belt laws and compliance is growing. Brownlee says 59% of drivers now buckle up and belts are 50% effective in preventing fatalities. Every additional 10% who buckle up will save 2,000 lives a year.

All 50 states and the District of Columbia have enacted laws requiring that children, in most cases up to 4 or 5 years of age, be restrained by car seats or safety belts. Alaska’s law goes to age 16 and Iowa’s carries a $500 fine.

Brownlee forecasts that 10 years from now seat belts will be automatic and all cars will have air bags. Hurley says that any parent who buys a teen-ager a car without an air bag has got to be crazy.

Recent incidents in Chicago and New York in which elderly drivers jumped the curbs and killed pedestrians brought into question whether old age and failing mental acuity is a safety problem.

But experts, while admitting that people with dementia conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease should have their keys taken away, old age in itself is not a safety problem.

It is true that the number of older drivers killed and injured rose dramatically in the 1980s, but so did the number of older drivers.

Robin A. Barr of the National Institute on Aging says the number of drivers 70 and older rose 49% in the last decade, and deaths among those 65 and older rose 43%.

“There is no support for the view that older drivers are an undue risk to other people using the road or that the risk is increasing,” he says. In fact, crash rates for older people actually fell in the last decade.

But when crashes occur, older people are at greater risk of dying.

“Older people tend to drive less and slower and closer to home,” says Hurley of the Insurance Institute. “So it is not the same problem as say, teen-agers. As we all get older we will have to consider such measures as re-licensing,” measuring the older person’s visual acuity, night and peripheral vision and the ability to read signs and react to them in a safe manner.

The major safety push after the national speed limit was reduced was the formation of Mothers Against Drunk Drivers in 1980. It offered an argument that was unanswerable. MADD points out that all states have now adopted a minimum drinking age of 21 and estimates that has saved 7,700 lives.

It also claims credit for the fact that all but four states--Maryland, Massachusetts, South Carolina and Tennessee--have laws making it a crime to drive with blood alcohol levels above .08 or .10, which is roughly the amount the human body can metabolize in an hour.

So compelling has MADD’s message been, it has found some unusual allies--some of the nation’s leading breweries.

The Miller Brewing Co. says it has spent millions of its advertising dollars pressing its “Think When You Drink” program. Anheuser-Busch has found that its “Know When To Say When” program is recognized as a “don’t drink and drive” message.

But their programs go deeper than that. Both encourage designated driver programs.

Anheuser-Busch, makers of Budweiser, says its 900 wholesalers have provided 27,000 free rides home to people who have had too much to drink.

Miller has a program for providing free soft drinks or nonalcoholic beer to people who volunteer to be a designated driver.

Both have training booklets and programs for bartenders and waitresses to inform them how to intervene between the drinker and his car. Miller puts out a directory of drivers’ licenses so that fake ID cards can be more easily detected.

Short of going out of business, there is not much else they can do.

The safety gurus recognize that there is a limit to redeeming the human mind from error. The last-ditch stand against “accidents” will be the car itself. After seat belts, after air bags, after drunk driving and speed, there will be changes in the structure of the car itself.

“Make sure,” says Charles Hurley, “cars do not get smaller. We are seeing, again in terms of trade-off, a lot of hard-won gain in safety being given up to the smaller car. I’m not sure that people realize that when they buy a smaller car for fuel economy and convenience that they have effectively doubled their chance of fatality for themselves and their families. There’s less car to protect you.”

Also, he says, smaller cars have a higher incidence of rollovers because of the height, length and wheel base shrinkage. All cars need strengthened sides to protect occupants from cross-traffic collisions.

Another area requiring more attention is the pedestrian. Designing roads and developments like shopping malls, more care should be given to separating the car from the pedestrian, Hurley says. It’s not a good idea to build a shopping center across the street from an old-age home.

“We lose 8,000 a year in pedestrian fatalities,” Hurley says. “It’s an area that is simply not getting enough attention, particularly when society ages and cars speed up.”

As gruesome as it sounds, softer hoods on cars would help, since so many fatal incidents come when the pedestrian is bounced off the hood.

Finally, the American driver might have to sacrifice some of the ego satisfaction he gets from the car he buys.

There are signs that today’s car buyers are already altering the criteria they use when buying cars, Hurley says. It used to be quality, price, safety. Today’s priorities are quality, safety, price.

Americans apparently want safety and are willing to pay for it.

States which do not enforce the safety belt law:

ALABAMA

KENTUCKY

MAINE

MASSACHUSETTS

NEBRASKA

NEW HAMPSHIRE

NO. DAKOTA

RHODE ISLAND

SO. DAKOTA

VERMONT