SAMANTHA APPLETON FOR TIME

Commuters, vendors and cows jostle for position in Delhi's congested and chaotic streets

Mean Streets
	As millions of Asians get behind the wheel, the region's overloaded roads are becoming highways to hell
	By Jim Erickson

Posted Monday, August 2, 2004; 20:00 HKT
He won't admit it, but Nadarajah Shan-Mugam's vanity saved his life. The 49-year-old Malaysian handyman was riding his motorbike to work in Kuala Lumpur one morning last year when an irritating drizzle suddenly billowed into a blinding tropical downpour. Spotting a flyover a few hundred meters ahead on the highway, Raja raced for shelter. A dozen fellow bikers were there already. As three lanes of rush-hour traffic continued to roar past, more bikers squeezed in, huddling together and turning their backs to the windblown rain and the heavy spray from passing vehicles. Raja lit a cigarette, then tilted one of his rear-view mirrors to check just how bedraggled he looked.

Instead, he glimpsed something horrifying: a speeding truck was hurtling toward him, the driver wrestling with the wheel as the vehicle skidded over the slick tarmac. Raja vaulted to safety over a steel road divider just as the truck plowed into the other bikers. Four were killed instantly and a dozen were injured. "All I got was a cut from the hitting the divider," Raja recalled the next day. "The others never saw the truck coming. They didn't have a chance."

For millions of other Asian motorists, the odds aren't a whole lot better. One of the dismaying side effects of the region's economic growth—and the accompanying boom in motor-vehicle purchases by the newly prosperous—has been a staggeringly high traffic-fatality rate. With just 16% of the world's cars, trucks, buses and motorcycles, Asia accounts for more than half of the roughly 1.2 million traffic fatalities that the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates occur globally every year. More than 600,000 Asians are killed and another 9.4 million are severely injured in traffic accidents annually.

Those statistics make Asia's highways the meanest streets in the world. In Thailand, for example, road accidents are now the third leading cause of death after aids and heart attacks, according to the country's Ministry of Public Health. In China and India, where members of expanding middle classes are taking to the roads in record numbers, crash rates are growing out of control. Car ownership in China jumped 41% between 1999 and 2002, while over the same period accidents increased twice as fast, by more than 83%. P.K. Sikdar, director of the Central Road Research Institute, a New Delhi-based traffic consultancy, ranks the carnage in India right up there with his country's natural disasters—except that "earthquakes and cyclones don't come every year. Road accidents come routinely," he says. "Like clockwork, more than 80,000 people [BRACKET {a year}] simply get wiped out on our roads."

Asia's motorists are plagued by hazards faced by travelers everywhere: drunk drivers, bad weather, heavy traffic. But developing countries harbor a host of other factors that heighten the peril. With car and motorcycle sales rising fast, deficit-ridden governments are hard-pressed to build wider, safer highways to accommodate swarms of new commuters. In poorer nations, existing road systems are often badly maintained and lack basic infrastructure such as stop signs and traffic signals. Traffic in Asia is frequently a tumultuous and deadly mix of pedestrians, affordable (but highly vulnerable) motorcycles, cars, pickup trucks ferrying loads of passengers, and heavy trucks that feed the region's voracious economic engine—all vying for places in line along the same overburdened stretches of blacktop.

To this mix add lax law enforcement, a flood of inexperienced drivers, and a marked indifference to safety on the part of many motorists, and it's little wonder that Asia's highways sometimes resemble a Mad Max movie set. Shanghai resident Huang Wei, a recent graduate of a Chinese driving school, recalls how during one training session her instructor scolded her for using her turn indicator to signal her intention to change lanes: "He shouted at me, 'What are you doing? Never use your turn signal for changing lanes! If you let the car behind you know what you are doing, he will never make way for you. He'll speed up!'" Fang Shou'en, director of China's National Traffic Accident Prevention Committee, says such offensive driving behavior is nearly universal among China's aggressive, me-first motorists. "There is no concept of right-of-way," he says. "It is like survival of the fittest."

And, sometimes, the luckiest. At an intersection of Bangkok's busy Pattanakarn Road in June, the driver of a gray Hilux pickup lost patience waiting for an interminable red light and attempted a quick U-turn into oncoming traffic. He was rammed by a Toyota sedan; the impact spun one vehicle into six motorcycles whose riders were waiting at the light, while the other was propelled into two other motorcyclists turning into Pattanakarn Road. Although nine people were injured, no one died. Others have not been so fortunate. "This road is the worst," says Sommai Nutang, a 46-year-old truck driver whose home is nearby. "There are lots of accidents every night, especially weekends after 8 p.m. There's no policeman stationed here and people are always running red lights. People just drive so carelessly, and too fast. We're always running out to see what's going on." A billboard looming over the intersection urges: "Drive Safely. Turn On Your Lights. Wear Your Helmet. Best Wishes from the Bang Mod Police Office."

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