Mean Streets — page 2

The cost in human suffering is incalculable, but plenty of economists have tried to estimate the financial impact of traffic accidents. The World Bank puts annual losses worldwide due to traffic injuries at 1-2% of global GDP. In Asia, that figure might climb much higher, partly because three-quarters of those injured in the region are younger than 45, which means that Asia's most productive workers are being decimated. According to a recent Asian Development Bank (ADB) paper, the 11 country members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) saw a total loss of some $11 billion in 2000 due to the 73,000 road deaths and 1.8 million injuries the ADB estimates their citizens suffered that year.

Authorities in countries such as China appear to be waking up to the high cost of doing nothing to improve road safety. On May 1, China's first road-safety laws came into effect. The new legislation tightens rules governing such offenses as speeding and drunk driving, and also raises penalties significantly—for example, imposing a lifetime driving ban on drivers who flee the scene of an accident, and sentences of up to seven years in prison for those who kill someone while driving drunk. Something had to be done. While mainland China possesses just 1.9% of the world's vehicles, last year it accounted for 15% of total global traffic accidents. (More than 100,000 people died on China's roads in 2003.)

With millions of new cars and fledgling drivers clogging mainland China's transportation system—there were 16.7 million new vehicles and 11 million new motorists last year—strict enforcement of new traffic laws is crucial. Unfortunately, as is often the case elsewhere in Asia, enforcement is the weakest link in the road-safety chain. "Police corruption is widespread in China. That's no secret," says Liu, a crew-cut, 37-year-old traffic cop who declined to give his full name. "It's especially true in the traffic section. If you help spring a murderer, you're going to feel a heavy psychological burden. But if you help a friend beat a traffic fine, you feel nothing." The Beijing cop says most policemen he knows have helped get friends or acquaintances off the hook for traffic violations. "It's become part of our culture," Liu says. "China has plenty of laws. It's the enforcement that's lacking."

The measures that will make Asia's highways safer are well known. Laid out in a range of studies emanating over the years from the ADB and other multilateral institutions, they include: stricter legislation in critical areas such as speeding and drunk driving; wider use of seat belts and helmets; more money to improve highway infrastructure; improved driver education; improved treatment for accident victims; and greater commitment to providing police with the salaries, equipment and training needed to ensure they will scrupulously enforce the law. The ADB, in particular, conducted a regional road-safety study in 1997 that provided detailed guidelines to each of ASEAN's 11 countries.

But a follow-up report written in 2002 concluded that "very few of the recommendations ... appear to have been implemented." Programs that were initiated were usually halted by governments when foreign aid for them dried up, the ADB report said. Indeed, the size and complexity of the challenge they face seems to produce resignation in some officials. "This city has more vehicles than Madras', Bombay's and Calcutta's put together," sighs New Delhi's traffic-police commissioner Qamar Ahmad. "If you combine this with the burgeoning population and outmoded road system, problems are inevitable."

This fatalism is mirrored in Asia's motoring society as a whole. Bangkok-based professor Yordphol says many Thai motorists believe that no matter how defensively they drive, their fate is predetermined. "We are trying to persuade them that accidents are not an act of God," Yordphol says, "that you can avoid them if you are careful, obey the laws, and not speed or drive under the influence."

Convincing drivers will not be easy. "This kind of thing is an occupational hazard," shrugs Pichet Sorpoon, a Bangkok cabbie who has stopped to watch as victims of the crash on Pattanakarn Road are carted away on stretchers. His sentiment is shared by Ahmad. When it comes to intractable road hazards, he says: "You just have to live with it." In the coming years, it seems inevitable that millions of Asians will have to die with it.

With reporting by Simon Elegant/Kuala Lumpur, Robert Horn/Bangkok, Huang Yong, Kaiser Kuo and Jodi Xu/Beijing, Sara Rajan/New Delhi and Phil Zabriskie/Hanoi

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