Mean Streets — page 2

Thailand's road safety Operations Center—unofficially known as the "war room"—is where the country's authorities are trying to bring the national accident rates down to the level of many Western countries. (With an average of 36 deaths a day, Thailand ranks sixth in the world in road fatalities, according to the WHO.) Workers at the center, located in government offices in Bangkok, collate reports of casualties coming in from police, hospitals and rescue workers around the country. The war room is also the staging area for the various programs established to make highways safer, particularly during holiday periods when fatalities spike. The government earlier this year set up extra checkpoints to get drunk drivers off the road, launched public-service ad campaigns urging people to stay sober and drive safely, and even rounded up young road racers and took them on a tour of morgues, autopsy rooms and prisons to impress upon them the dangers of reckless driving.

So far, gains have been negligible. "We've declared war on road accidents, but we've lost the first four battles in that war," says Nikorn Jamnong, Deputy Minister of Transport and Communications, referring to the lack of a meaningful reduction in the death toll during four preceding major holidays. Soft-spoken and unassuming, Nikorn is the point man for the government's road-safety campaign. For Nikorn, the effort has a personal dimension. Raising his right hand from the leather blotter on his dark wooden desk, he traces a faint crease in his skin running from his left temple down to the corner of his mouth. "Thirty-four stitches," he says, then spreads his jaws and taps his upper teeth. "Not real." The scars are reminders of a 1988 Bangkok accident in which Nikorn's car was sideswiped by a drunken 18-year-old driving a pickup truck.

Nikorn isn't expecting his campaign to win easy victories. The causes of accidents are so varied—poor roadway design, unsafe vehicles, and human error among them. There are no quick-fix solutions. Yordphol Tanaboriboon, a transportation-engineering professor at the Asian Institute of Technology in Bangkok, says one of the few generalizations that can be made is that the high proportion of motorcycles on Thailand's roads (of the country's 26 million registered vehicles, 12 million are two-wheelers; according to Nikorn, there are another 6 million unregistered motorcycles) is linked to a higher death rate. As many as 80% of all fatal accidents in Thailand involve motorcycles, which are light, tricky to control, and leave riders exposed to injury even in the slightest brushes with heavier cars and trucks. They are also wildly popular in many parts of Asia because almost anyone can afford one. "We really need motorcycle-only lanes on our roads" to keep riders from tangling with heavier forms of vehicles, Yordphol says. But with existing roads already hopelessly congested, the measure seems too expensive to undertake and nearly impossible to enforce.

Indeed, authorities throughout Asia have discovered how difficult it can be to persuade motorists to obey the rules of the road or to take even the most obviously beneficial safety precautions. In Vietnam, where 95% of the vehicles on the road are motorcycles, helmets are mandatory. Yet only 3% of riders wear them, according to the WHO. Riders contemptuously refer to helmets as "rice cookers," too uncomfortable to wear in the country's steamy weather.

Too often, they pay an appalling price to feel—and look—cool. Among the 30 patients in the head-injury ward at Hanoi's Viet Duc Hospital, doctors say 70-80% are there due to motorcycle accidents. Dr. Nguyen Kim Lien, a steely eyed woman in her 40s who runs the ward, estimates that a third of her patients wouldn't be there if they had been wearing helmets. For her part, Dr. Lien says she sticks to a bicycle, always wears a helmet and insists that all her family members do, too. But old habits are hard to change, even for the best informed. Another doctor on the ward, Nguyen Duy Tuyen, also specializes in head injuries and spends most of his time treating motorcyclists. Does he wear a helmet himself when riding a motorbike? "No," he confesses with a sheepish smile.

If he needs more convincing, Dr. Tuyen could walk a few blocks down the street to meet Bach Dinh Vinh. Now 30, Vinh was studying for a degree in information technology in 1993. A top student in his class, he could speak fluent English and Russian and was learning French. One night, while riding his bicycle back from class, he was struck from behind by a motorbike. He hit his head on the concrete road and was knocked out. Doctors managed to save his life, but he was almost completely paralyzed. Vinh struggled through an agonizing six years of rehabilitation to regain control of his right hand. He has this advice for his fellow commuters: "Go slowly and obey the law."

Besides the prevalence of motorcycles, there appears to be another universal truth underlying Asia's soaring highway death rates: fatalities increase when business is booming. "It's the dark side of economic growth," says Hisashi Ogawa, a regional environmental-health adviser for the WHO. He notes that rates begin to ease only after countries become rich enough to put in place costly measures to moderate the slaughter. Sadly, this means that Asia's statistics are bound to get uglier. India and China, the most populous countries in the world, have exploding middle classes whose members are reaching for the car keys for the very first time—yet it will be years before those nations are able to fully afford the costs of safer highways. According to a World Bank study last year, if India's current rates of economic growth continue uninterrupted, the country won't hit the critical point at which road death rates begin to improve (per capita income of $8,600) until 2049. Today, one person dies every 6 1/2 minutes on India's roads; by 2020, that figure is projected to reach more than one every 3 minutes.

If one city epitomizes the perfect storm engulfing Asia's roads, it is surely India's capital, New Delhi. Swarming the city's potholed streets are 4 million cars and trucks, 600,000 motorized two- and three-wheeled vehicles and innumerable bicycles and nonmotorized forms of transport ranging from trishaws to ox carts. There are also animals, everything from sacred cows to dogs, cats, monkeys—as well as countless pedestrians. The latter do not fare well in this free-for-all. New Delhi's newspapers recently labeled the city a "pedestrian graveyard." According to the capital's transport department, nearly half of the 1,700 people killed in traffic in the city last year were on foot.

Of course, being surrounded by sheet metal is no guarantee of safety. Poorly maintained vehicles, as well as a large number of tinny, cheap cars on New Delhi's roads, also contribute to accidents and injuries. Many domestically made cars do not undergo crash testing, and until a few years ago, economy models often lacked even rudimentary safety equipment such as seat belts. "These cars are designed for city traffic and people will take them out onto our 120 km/h highways and get splattered," says Sikdar, the Central Road Research Institute director.

And those lucky enough to survive an accident often find that their problems are just beginning because of the lack of emergency-medical services. An ambulance team sponsored by the New Delhi government has only 35 vehicles for a city of 15 million people. Up to half of those hurt in road accidents die on the way to the hospital. "In India, the victim of a road accident goes through three kinds of trauma," says Dr. Shakti Gupta of AIIMS hospital in New Delhi. "First is the accident itself, then the trip to a hospital. And if they manage to survive both of those, then they still have to survive negligent emergency-room doctors."

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	Hell on (Three) Wheels [Mar. 03, 2003] Is Thailand's iconic tuk tuk on its way out? Under the Wheels [Nov. 18, 2002] The motorcycle rules in VietnamÑbut now bike fatalities are fueling a trade spat with Japan Made in China: On Yer Bike! [Aug. 10, 2001] Beijingers needing respite from the crowds and pollution are rediscovering the bicycle Seoul Searching: Gridlock [Mar. 08, 2001] Korea's traffic chaos is back—with a vengeance More Related Items | Search all issues of TIME Magazine