Ladies, here’s why women are better drivers than men
· Citizen
Members of the South African Academy of Engineering (SAAE) and the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf) gathered on Thursday to discuss issues related to road safety in South Africa and highlighted that women are more cautious drivers than men.
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The discussions focused on driving behaviour and overall road safety from an engineering perspective.
Busisiwe Marole from the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) reimagined a safer approach to roads to prevent fatalities.
Devastating reality
Felix Reinders from ASSAf said the stark reality of the statistics and the challenges facing the transport network, including the state of roads, infrastructure and service delivery, is devastating.
“We are confronting a public safety crisis that claims roughly between 11 000 and 12 000 lives on our roads every single year,” he noted.
Meanwhile, Marole from CSIR highlighted various research reports from the Road Traffic Management Corporation (RTMC) published in 2025 showing that 75% of people who die on South African roads are male, largely due to risky behaviour.
“Perhaps it’s been said in detail on this, that men have riskier behaviour than women, and women are more cautious,” she noted.
Various experiences
Marole said women are generally more cautious on the roads than men, while emphasising that 65% of children already live without their biological fathers.
“Already in South Africa, we have 65% of children who live without their biological fathers,” said Marole.
“So if we look at the impact of fatalities and the people who are mostly affected, you are looking at a national development crisis with cascading social, economic and demographic consequences.”
According to Marole, it has been proven that men and women have different experiences when they travel within the transport environment, especially when it comes to the laws of the road and obeying road signs.
“So, when we look at road users, 75% of the South African population is not sufficiently accommodated in the traditional South African road-design approach, [which] currently consists of males and females younger and older than 18,” she added.
Human factors
Marole also noted that pedestrians account for about 50% of road fatalities, with men making up the majority of those involved in jaywalking incidents.
“So it has been said that human factors are the main contributor to the pressures that we see, and if you look at the causes of human factors, it is mainly jaywalking pedestrians and hit-and-run [incidents],”
She emphasised the need to view road design from an engineering perspective, as road signs and infrastructure lead to speeding and leave no space for pedestrians to get where they need to be.
“And we also need to then look at what we are doing from an engineering perspective, which is resulting in pedestrian jaywalking, firstly, and resulting in people speeding.”
She noted that only 25% of the South African population of road users are actually being accommodated in traditional road design.
“And we need to start asking ourselves these critical questions, like who are we designing for?”
Reimagining safe road systems
Marole outlined a reimagined version of the Safe Systems Approach, introduced in 2017, which emphasises road-user education and compliance, particularly for vulnerable road users who may make mistakes.
“The system must be designed to absorb human error, and there must be a system from a road, vehicle, pedestrian and speed perspective.”
“And if one fails, then the other ones must still be there to protect it.”
Infrastructure for road users
She explained that this approach needs to be engineered through a perspective that prioritises infrastructure so that road users remain at the heart of it.
“We want to have safe users who are educated around the road environment, [who] are compliant as well.”
“And we know that these physically vulnerable pedestrians who are walking to schools and to their place of work on a daily basis, make errors
“Then we also have to look at the environment in which people are walking, the multimodal transport and land use aspects.”
She concluded that road sign markings need to be designed so they are visible to all road users to improve road conditions and reduce fatalities in the country.