Why Are SO MANY Women Such BAD Drivers????

[mekender]

I delivered food in the tourist areas of Orlando for many years... the Brazilian and German drivers are BY FAR the worst

[Greg]

Having driven through the northeast lately, including NJ, MA and PA, I have to put my vote to Hartford, CT.
If at all possible, I'd take wide detours around that place.

Oooh, that's a good one. I almost forgot about Hartford, haven't done that one in a while. From 2000 to 2002 I used to drive from MA to NJ and back about every other weekend. Hartford was bad. 84 through Hartford is often terrifying. And the connecting road between 91 and 84 is apparently a viaduct over a landfill, close the windows and turn on recirculate unless you crave the odor of rotting garbage.

[crazylegs]

I second the opinion that women aren't as good at spacial orientation. I've had two girlfriends who I've tried to teach how to drive. Both of them aced the Permit, but didn't have a license. Neither could gain access to a vehicle that was suitable for the driving test. One of them had a 67 four door nova with a bad parking brake, the other ones' family only owned trucks.

Both of these ladies had permits since they were 17, were in thier early 20s, and niether one could feel or judge anything beyond the back seat or the front firewall.

The girl with the truck was a nightmare. She just couldn't feel out where the vehicle was. She was driving her dads pickup when she turned too tight in a parking lot, and tagged the side of the bed on the bumper of a parked truck. She couldn't turn into a parking space at all, she had to physically line up the entire vehicle, a good five feet from behind the parking space before she would pull in. Slanted spaces without parking blocks screwed her mind up. She would try to park straight into them, lining up her nose with the curb, instead of lining the truck the up with the lines. At the last second, she'd realize she was crooked, and turn the car, leaving it all most lined up.

The girl with the Nova wasn't half bad. Her main problems involved getting used to my saturn. She wasn't used to power steering, power braking, and the center gauge cluster threw her for a loop. She also had really bad panic reflexes. But it seemed to me that she couldn't get used to the smaller cars smaller footprint either. She never pulled far enough into a parking space, she swung her turns too wide, I gradually got the sense that it wasn't so much because she was used to her car. It was because she had no spatial judgement whatsoever. Instead of feeling where the car was, she had a simple set of rules, concerning turning and clearance, that would keep her out of trouble. IE, As long as whatever is in front of me is further then X distance away, I shouldn't hit it. As long as I turn the steering wheel between X and Y I shouldn't miss my turn or hit the curb. Otherwise, she had no true sense of where the noses or tails on either vehicle really were.

That being said, I'll also second the notion that when men have accidents, we usually go full bore for damage. None of these ladies would ever dream of pushing thier moms Dodge dynasty up to 110, the way I did when I was a hoodlum teenager. Women seem to follow general safety rules better, they slow down immediately when it starts raining, where men wait to see how it is going to rain, if the rain will effect visibility, or if the rain is starting to collect on the road. The man will say "Slow down? I haven't had to turn on my windshield wipers yet. Its just a little sprinkle." Five seconds later we drive into a quick moving thunderstorm, and find ourselves trying to slow down, turn on the wipers, and not hydroplane all at the same time.

[clembrewer]

I believe that it comes down primarily to spatial relationships. Men can in general can read maps while women can't. Evolution has caused a part of our brains to be formed differently. Driving is all about spatial relationships. Obviously, there exceptions to the rule, but in general it works.