That age-old stereotype about dangerous women drivers is shattered in a big new traffic analysis in the U.S.: Male drivers have a 77 percent higher risk of dying in a car accident than women, based on miles driven.

And the author of the research says he takes it to heart when he travels -- his wife takes the wheel.

"I put a mitt in my mouth and ride shotgun," said David Gerard, a Carnegie Mellon University researcher who co-authored a major new U.S. road risk analysis.

The study holds plenty of surprises.

--The highway death rate is higher for cautious 82-year-old women than for risk-taking 16-year-old boys.

--The northeastern region known as New England is the safest area for drivers -- despite all those stories about crazy Boston drivers.

--The safest passenger is a youngster strapped in a car seat and being driven during morning rush hour.

The findings are from Traffic STATS, a detailed and searchable new risk analysis of road fatality statistics by Carnegie Mellon for the American Automobile Association. Plans are to make the report public next week, but The Associated Press got an early look.

The analysis calculates that overall, about one death occurs for every 100 million passenger miles (160 million passenger kilometers) traveled. And it shows that some long-held assumptions about safety on U.S. highways do not jibe with hard numbers. It lists the risk of road death by age, gender, type of vehicle, time of day and geographic region.

"We are finding comparisons that are surprising all the time," said study co-author Paul Fischbeck, a Carnegie Mellon professor of social and decision sciences. "What is necessary now is to go through and do that second level of analysis to figure out why some of these things are true."

For example, those dangerous 82-year-old women are 60 percent more likely to die on the road than a 16-year-old boy because they are so frail, said Anne McCartt, a research official at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, who was not part of the study.

"It's an issue not of risk-taking behavior, but of fragility," McCartt said. The elderly are more likely to die when they are injured in an accident, she said, an explanation that Gerard and Fischbeck validate.

These elderly women have the nation's highest road death risks even when they're not driving -- five times higher than the national average.

Right behind octogenarians in high risk are young male drivers, ages 16-23 with fatality rates four times higher than average.

That can be attributed to "inexperience and immaturity," McCartt said.

As for men being more likely to die than women? McCartt and Fischbeck said men take more risks, speed more, drink and drive more.

"They do stupider things," said Fischbeck, a former military pilot who has twin toddlers and a "totally unsafe" 1974 Volkswagen Thing.