Hey Ladies and Cabbies: Sorry for Calling You Bad Drivers All These Years
New York City transportation planners have released the findings of a study focused on pedestrian accidents on city streets and two shocking things were learned: women don't be gettin' in accidents and taxis aren't that dangerous after all.
Taxis, it turns out, were no careering menace: cabs accounted for far fewer pedestrian accidents in Manhattan than privately owned vehicles. Jaywalkers, surely the city's most numerous scofflaws, were involved in fewer collisions than their law-abiding counterparts who waited for the "walk" sign.
And one discovery could permanently upend one of the uglier stereotypes of the motoring world: in 80 percent of city accidents that resulted in a pedestrian's death or serious injury, a male driver was behind the wheel.
So there you have it. Big stupid men driving big stupid non-commercial vehicles are responsible for most of the pedestrian squishenings in this peril-plagued city. Though, hm, if we look at those numbers again, taxi drivers might not be off the hook:
In Manhattan, about 16 percent of pedestrian crashes that led to death or serious injury involved a taxi or livery cab. That is far above the city's taxi registration rate of 2 percent, but taxis can make up nearly half of Manhattan's traffic at some times of day, according to some estimates. Throughout the city, 80 percent of the serious crashes involved private motorists.
So we're talking about city-wide, like including way out in deepest Queens and up in the quiet corners of the Bronx and in the forgotten forest wastelands of Staten Island, suburb-ish places where there aren't taxis. Given that taxis are mostly in Manhattan (and, let's be honest, mostly south of 125th street), that's a really big percentage of pedestrian accidents for a relatively small amount of space. So taxis are something to be feared, as long as you're in Manhattan.
And! If you figure that most taxis are driven by men, that tilts the gender numbers a little bit, so we can then still say that the women driving outside of Manhattan are bad drivers, because we can point to skewed data! VINDICATION, once again.