



The study holds plenty of surprises.



- The safest passenger is a youngster strapped in a car seat and being driven during morning rush hour. The findings are from Traffic STATS, a detailed and searchable new risk analysis of road fatality statistics by Carnegie Mellon for the American Automobile Association. Plans are to make the report public next week, but The Associated Press got an early look.

The analysis calculates that overall, about one death occurs for every 100million passenger miles traveled. And it shows that some long-held assumptions about safety on U.S. highways don't jibe with hard numbers. It lists the risk of road death by age, gender, type of vehicle, time of day and geographic region.




"It's an issue not of risk-taking behavior, but of fragility," McCartt said. The elderly are more likely to die when they are injured in an accident, she said, an explanation that Gerard and Fischbeck validate.

These elderly women have the nation's highest road death risks even when they're not driving — five times higher than the national average.

Right behind octogenarians in high risk are young male drivers, ages 16-23 with fatality rates four times higher than average.

That can be attributed to "inexperience and immaturity," McCartt said.

Drivers aged 40 and 50 tie for the lowest risk of dying in an accident. But if you're a male out at 2 a.m. Saturday on a motorcycle in the South, you may want to take out some more insurance.

By combining a batch of data of all types, you can construct the safest possible scenario on the road. That would involve a 4-year-old girl in a van or school bus, stuck in a Wednesday morning rush hour in New England in February.


"They are really protected, they're being driven around in times of day when it's very safe (and often in minivans)," Fischbeck said. "It's a win-win-win-win situation."


"They do stupider things," said Fischbeck, a former military pilot who has twin toddlers and a "totally unsafe" 1974 Volkswagen Thing.


"It's a combination of they're safe and the people who drive them are dull," Fischbeck said.


But the death rate on motorcycles was nearly 32 times higher than for cars. One of the riskiest combinations in the database are men ages 21 to 24 who drive motorcycles between midnight and 4 a.m. Their road fatality risk is 45,000 times higher than normal.



That explains New England's No.1 ranking for lowest death risk on the road, she said.

Heavy traffic "makes it much more difficult for people to speed," McCartt said.