The age old question. I thought I would try and answer it using data from the Canadian National Collision Database. The Canadian government, as part of its Open Data initiative, has made publicly available, a dataset that contains over 4 million records of traffic collision reports. This dataset contains 13 years worth of data, from 1999 to 2011.

Let’s first take a look at percentage of male and female drivers involved in car accidents.

Maybe the men will come out on top if we slice the data a bit differently. Let’s see the data sliced by age groups over all years. Well that is unfortunate. Women are consistently safer across the age groups. But what if we broke the data down by age group, sex and year. Perhaps there would be a few years where men come out on top. Maybe it’s time we conclude that women just might be the better drivers. I know, fellow men, it stings. The women have out performed the men, in every age group and every year. But the above graph has some interesting patterns. The age groups look the same every year, except for the fact that the number of accidents is decreasing across the board. Are Canadian roads actually getting safer? We will explore that in part 2. EDIT: The data used above is not normalized by the number of miles driven by each driver or by the number of average miles driven by male and female drivers. I just couldn’t find the corresponding for that normalization.