If women ruled the world, this is what roads would look like. Or something.
One (misguided) insurance company has put forward the idea of ‘pink lanes’ – female-only flyovers so women can soar over busy roads and nip ahead of that early morning rush-hour traffic.
Another shows how a gender-separated lane would apparently allow women to freely zip along the motorway without the fear of male drivers getting in the way (presumably as the battle for equality sits on the hard shoulder calling breakdown recovery).
The company claims the mocked-up images ‘would remove them from a potentially dangerous environment’ – albeit being a ‘futuristic’ concept.
Steve Stradling, an expert in transport psychology at Napier University in Edinburgh, says men are well known to take more risks and that applies when they are behind the wheel as much as anywhere else. Couple that natural tendency with the fact that men tend to drive more powerful cars than women and you have a recipe for what the emergency services abbreviate to RTAs. Road traffic accidents involving men tend to be worse because the speed of the impact is higher. “Speed feels good. And men tend to be more susceptible to thinking, I’m in a powerful car, the road’s good, let’s go,” says Stradling.
