Please hoot for PE women
HOOT if you agree — South Africa’s best drivers are women, older than 50, have conscientious personalities and live in Port Elizabeth.
This is according to the Discovery Insure Driving Challenge, which assessed the driving habits of more than 30 000 people in the 10 largest metropolitan areas in the country.
The challenge uses a driver’s smartphone app.
The results, which were released last week, reveal that drivers from PE are South Africa’s best, followed by those in Cape Town and Bloemfontein. Johannesburg drivers are down in fifth place.
Durbanites fare even worse — drivers in the coastal city come in ninth, two places below provincial rivals Pietermaritzburg and ahead only of Nelspruit.
“Port Elizabeth’s greatest areas of improvement are lower levels of speeding, coupled with fewer distracted-driving events that mostly involve phone use while driving,” the company said.
Answering naysayers who might think that PE only won because it has less congested roads and because its drivers covered shorter distances, Discovery’s Dipuo Tshoagong said the scoring was fair.
“On a like-to-like basis, PE drives better per kilometre. We took actual individual driver behaviour into account, which doesn’t measure the amount of traffic on the road,” she said.
AA spokesman Layton Beard said the good road manners of PE drivers appeared to make the difference.
“It could be that drivers in PE don’t talk on their cellphones while driving, don’t text, don’t eat, don’t do their makeup and do not turn to speak to people in the back seat . . . thus the chance of being involved in a collision or crash gets reduced,” said Beard.
Tshoagong also weighed in on the men vs women debate: “On average, it is clear that women drivers are better than men.”
Women scored better in driving areas such as smooth acceleration, balanced cornering and not speeding. However, their braking skills are worse than their male counterparts and they also look at their phones a lot more.
Tshoagong said the app — which is not only available to members of the medical aid — could be used to change how people drive and, possibly, lead to fewer road fatalities over the festive season.
However, the South African Insurance Association’s motor manager, Zakes Sondiyazi, said that Discovery’s results might not be a true reflection of the country’s driving habits.
“The SAIA and the insurance industry do not have a uniform standard with regards to safety. It will differ according to the risk in question. For example, one city could have a high prevalence of hail storms, another could have a high number of accidents, and another could have a high number of hijackings or thefts of vehicles,” he said.
It could be that they don’t text, don’t eat, don’t do their makeup