Drive a Flashy, Expensive Car? You Probably Have No Road Manners

I'm guilty of this.   I drive a flashy red car and I'm pretty intolerant of other drivers (but I do stop for pedestrians).  A new study says there are a lot of people like me.  And the more expensive the car?  The less likely you are to have manners when driving.

 And that's probably why our roads are so unsafe today.

Flashing crosswalk lights are no match for flashy cars, according to a new UNLV study which found that drivers of expensive cars are least likely to stop for crossing pedestrians, newswise.com reports.
"Drivers on a whole aren’t all that great at stopping for pedestrians waiting at crosswalks: Of 461 cars that researchers examined, only 28 percent yielded," the web site explains. But the cost of the car was a significant predictor of driver yielding, with the odds that they’ll stop decreasing by 3 percent per $1,000 increase in the car’s value. Researchers estimated the cost of each car using pricing categories from Kelley Blue Book.
“It says that pedestrians are facing some challenges when it comes to safety, and it’s really concerning,” newswise quotes lead author and UNLV public health professor Courtney Coughenour.
“Drivers need to be made aware that they legally have to yield. It’s hard to say whether they’re not yielding because they don’t know the laws or because they don’t want to yield,” Coughenour says. “Further study is needed to examine that. Until then, the bigger thing is driver education.”
The study, which analyzed video data from an earlier UNLV study, also found that motorists overall yielded less frequently for men and people of color waiting at mid-block crosswalks than for women and whites. It is also consistent with findings from similar studies on the topics of driver yielding behaviors associated with social class, race, and gender.
The research team said their findings are important to public health, given that the survivability for pedestrians is low even when they're struck by vehicles at low speeds. According to the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, the average risk of severe injury for a pedestrian struck by a vehicle reaches 10 percent at an impact speed of 16 mph, 25 percent at 23 mph, 50 percent at 31 mph, 75 percent at 39 mph, and 90 percent at 46 mph.



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