Males aged 16 accident prone

Press, 24 August 1977, Page 7

Males aged 16 accident prone

Sixteen-year-old male drivers are eight times more likely to have a serious road accident than the average driver. This is the finding of the Road Traffic Safety Research Council which has begun to analyse the first six months of a yearlong survey into the accident risk factor of different groups of motorists. The particular vulnerability of 16-year-old youths was revealed through a comparison of the number of accidents incurred by a motorist with the total distance he had driven. The survey also revealed that young, inexperienced drivers under 25 are the most endangered and endangering of

all motorists. Drivers of both sexes in the 40-50 age group were found to be the safest, and even older, inexperienced drivers were found to be safer than young, experienced drivers. Female drivers were judged to be one and a quarter times safer than males — although this could be attributed to the very poor record of males under the age of 25. The accident risk to all drivers was discovered to rise steeply after 6 p.m., with males significantly more at risk than females. Motor-cyclists appeared to be involved in crashes eight and a half times more frequently than motorists.