> From: Andy Ashworth <tcsaca@aie.lreg.co.uk>
> Date: Tue, 19 Apr 94 16:09:30 BST
>
>...
> The rates of involvement of each colour per 10 000 licensed cars are as
> follows:
> black - 179
> white - 160
> red - 157
> blue - 149
> grey - 147
> gold - 145
> silver - 142
> beige - 137
> green - 134
> brown - 133
> yellow - 133
> other - 139
>...
Boy.!. Kevin Burch's reply in BCD#1175 musing on time of day and whether the
cars' colors were blending in to their environments sure inspired some high
speculation on my part. How many factors affect the accident rates listed
above? Certainly, environmental conditions can have a major effect on
visibility. That is why fire trucks are increasingly being painted fluorescent
yellow/green or orange rather than red. You can SEE that yellow/green in all
conditions.
I also think psychology bears here too. Are the owners of black and red cars
more likely to take chances while driving in poor conditions or even on a
bright
sunny day than owners of gold or brown or beige cars? Are the young more
likely
to choose black, white, or red cars than beige or brown or yellow, and thus
skew
the results with their inexperience and known risk taking?
Years ago, I read a newpaper article about freshly released data compiled by
the
Oregon State Police about corelations of car color to tickets written and court
fines collected. Red cars topped that list. Black was second. I don't
remember the order of the other colors, but I took solice in knowing that
yellow
was at the bottom of that list too (I owned a yellow Midget at the time) and
its
rates for citations and fines at judgement were half the rates of red cars.
Naturally, citation rates are entirely dependent on who police officers decide
to pull over and cite. They also depend on the type of driving done by their
owners, and the severity of the fines might reflect the chanciness of the
driving done in those cars.
The article also listed the rates of the colors of all cars registered as new
that year and five and ten years previous. White was the most common color for
new cars that year (1990 or 91?) and gray or silver were listed as the most
common five years before that (ah, mid-80's charcoal... I remember it well) and
gold was it for ten years earlier. Red and black were always high on those
lists, but at much lower incidences than those same colors on the citations and
fines lists. Hmmmm......
I would love to spend the government's money making a study of this. <g>
I now own two red cars, and they are indeed ticket traps. The police see them
coming. I'll never buy another red car. I want to paint my Mk1 Spitwad BRG,
and my CRX has always attracted much more attention than that yellow Midget did
in three years of *hard* driving. C'est la vie. Live and learn.
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