By Sharanya Gopinathan
These new stats from the Delhi Police finally prove that women are better drivers than men.
Check this out. So according to police records, in Delhi, there’s one female license holder for every 75 male driving license holders, and 11 percent of the total number of cars or vehicles registered with RTOs are owned or driven by women. This gives you a sense of the disparity between the number of male and female drivers on the road, but even that (separately troubling) disparity fails to compensate for the huge chasm between men and women in terms of safe driving and following basic traffic rules.
Amazingly, not even a single woman was booked for driving under the influence of alcohol in 2017, which is perhaps the greatest and most important testament to good driving there is. Of the 26 lakh traffic tickets or challans issued in Delhi in 2017, only 600 involved women. Of the 1,39,471 drivers caught for speeding, only 517 were women, and there were only 44 women amongst the 1,67,867 drivers booked for jumping signals. Meaning that even the huge difference between male and female drivers on the road fails to account for the fact that men just seem to be driving more dangerously and recklessly (read: worse) than women.
There’s more. Only 2 percent of drivers involved in crashes were women. The Times of India quotes a study undertaken by the Delhi traffic police, in which it was found that women are more likely to drive within speed limits, and be careful at turns and intersections, as the possible reason by this stark disparity, and joint commissioner (traffic) Garima Bhatnagar, who said that women were simply more careful than men when driving.
Intriguingly, however, women are much more likely to be the victims of accidents than to cause them themselves. According to the Delhi traffic police, 10 percent of victims of fatal accidents, and 14 percent of those injured in accidents, were female. It’s been suggested that one major reason for this could be that many women ride sideways, and without a helmet, while riding pillion on scooters and motorcycles. Don’t women sit side-saddle on bikes to spare themselves the so-called indignity of sitting astride a seat with legs akimbo in public?
Anyway, these numbers are very satisfying in a told-you-so kind of way. Now I’ll go sit next to the type of people I know are prone to making lady driver jokes and leap up and shower them with these embarrassing statistics when they do.