PINK parking spaces? Spongy pavements for ease of high-heel walking? It appears the authorities in South Korea are doing their utmost to enhance the stereotypic view of women as stiletto-strutting beings who simply by dint of their sex are poorer drivers than their male counterparts.

Wider and longer parking spaces with pink outlines and skirt-wearing symbols, more than 7,000 new female only loos and re-surfaced pavements to soften the impact of perching an additional three inches higher, are all part of a £55m package in Seoul to make the capital city more friendly to women.

Providing better lighting for said parking spaces and placing them closer to the shops is all well and good. But to suggest spaces need to be bigger and footpaths spongier is a breath-taking piece of hackneyed patronising, to say the least.

And it’s not the first time it’s happened either. Back in 2012 the mayor of the German Black Forest town of Triberg introduced women-only parking spaces that were wider and better lit, leaving the men to cope with negotiating awkward walls and pillars.

That caused uproar at the time too because as any sexist pig will tell you, men are much better at parking than women because the fairer sex just can’t master the art of reversing a car into a narrow space. And as every indignant woman knows, male posturing about driving prowess is just that. All posture and bluster and not much else.

Sometimes though, the truth hurts. Driving Standards Agency figures have shown that women are more likely to fail their driving test because of problems with parking. The Department of Transport has reported that of the more than 1.6 million errors made in the driving test each year that are serious enough to register a fail, nearly a million were made by women. Ouch.

But that said, once us women have got our test ticket and take to life behind the wheel, we’re a LOT safer on the roads than men, whether we’re rubbish at parking or not. We break less speed limits, brake less suddenly and don’t drive around at night as much. Overall, women are a fifth safer at driving than men.

Although the same can’t be said of a woman I knew who was a bag of nerves behind the wheel. Undaunted, and screwing her courage to the sticking place, she doggedly persisted with her driving lessons until the dreaded test day dawned. It was never going to be a good day – she lost control of the car, careered over the verge, ploughed through a garden wall and landed in some poor soul’s front garden. Then with breath-taking audacity she turned to the quivering wreck of an examiner and asked: “Have I passed?”

 

ON a more serious note it was truly shocking to learn that North Yorkshire has one of the highest teenage driver death and injury tolls in the country. Fourteen per cent of all road casualties in the county are hurt or killed in collisions involving a car driver in the17 - 19 age group, although they make up only 1.5 per cent of licensed drivers.

I’m sure there are those with plenty of theories as to why that might be, although North Yorkshire’s geography with lots of minor country roads that are harder to police than those in more built up areas is possibly a factor.

But in trying to address the problem it’s actually those country roads that could become a barrier. Some car insurance companies offer restricted driving conditions for young drivers to push down costs and they invariably include clauses such as a late night curfew or a ban from carrying more than one passenger.

Both good ideas on the surface but in a rural environment that could essentially ground a youngster from work and meeting friends, or drive him – and let’s face it, the statistics show it’s mostly young males involved in these collisions – to flout any driving restrictions because of poor public transport links coupled with police officers spread thinly over vast tracts of ruraldom.

However it’s not just young drivers we should be concerned about but those at the other end of the age spectrum. A week after a 92 year old reversed her car through a York supermarket window we should be asking ourselves why our driving laws don’t include provision for independent rather than self assessment of a person’s ability to drive beyond a certain age.