From the Guardian:

Last year road accidents claimed more than 130,000 lives, overtaking China, where fatalities have dropped to less than 90,000, and prompted a government review into traffic safety, which until now has been best summed up by local drivers as “good horns, good brakes, good luck”.

As Smeed pointed out long ago, this divergence is unfortunately predictable via economics; China’s GDP (per a quick Wolfram Alpha search) per capita is more than three times that of India — and presumably it has risen faster in the last few years, and has now surpassed the “break even” point where traffic fatalities now begin to decline, for a variety of reasons. The upward surge in India, as per Smeed, is accompanying a move towards increasing motorization and may signal the high-water mark of traffic fatalities (or so we can hope). And from limited personal experience, there is certainly something to be said for road design and infrastructure, which uniformly appeared to be superior in China. In the latter country, I saw men in uniforms sweeping roadsides of debris; in the former, I saw children sleeping there.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 26th, 2010 at 8:57 am and is filed under Traffic safety. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.