CONTACTTRAFFICABOUT TOM VANDERBILTOTHER WRITING CONTACT ABOUT THE BOOK

Archive for September 18th, 2008

The Car Capital of the World Is…

Luxembourg.

As per the just-arrived Pocket World in Figures, from The Economist, the Grand Duchy has the most cars per 1,000 population: 647. (Also a bit improbably, Iceland is second).

Ethiopia claims the lowest rate, tied with Rwanda, with 1 car per 1000.

As an example of the sometime skewed relationship between car ownership and safety (as per Smeed’s Law), Botswana, which has just 42 cars per 1000 residents, is No. 1 in terms of traffic fatalities per 100,000 inhabitants (with 30).

The strangest figure to my mind was the “most injured in road accidents” column. The leader, by far, was Qatar, with 9,989 per 100,000 population. OK, so it also seems have to the most crowded road networks. But still, its injury rate (for a place where alcohol consumption is presumably lower) seems off the charts — its near neighbor, the UAE, for example, has just 183 (maybe the Qatari police are just really good at reporting).

Or is it something else? I do know that the Qataris are terrible when it comes to seat-belt wearing rates. Any other theories/facts/experiences?

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Posted on Thursday, September 18th, 2008 at 12:31 pm by: Tom Vanderbilt
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Traffic Tom Vanderbilt

How We Drive is the companion blog to Tom Vanderbilt’s New York Times bestselling book, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), published by Alfred A. Knopf in the U.S. and Canada, Penguin in the U.K, and in languages other than English by a number of other fine publishers worldwide.

Please send tips, news, research papers, links, photos (bad road signs, outrageous bumper stickers, spectacularly awful acts of driving or parking or anything traffic-related), or ideas for my Slate.com Transport column to me at: info@howwedrive.com.

For publicity inquiries, please contact Kate Runde at Vintage: krunde@randomhouse.com.

For editorial inquiries, please contact Zoe Pagnamenta at The Zoe Pagnamenta Agency: zoe@zpagency.com.

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