The Roads to Ruin

Day in, day out, 365 times a year, a passenger plane crashing somewhere in the European Union? On average, 110 people killed, 4,650 injured, every day? Impossible, of course. There would be panic, uproar, governments falling in the face of such unremitting carnage. But the only lie in this horrendous scenario is the word plane. Substitute car, and that is the annual swath in the E.U. — 40,000 people dead, another 1.7 million injured, with a little help from trucks, bicycles, motorbikes and errant pedestrians. Numbers to make a bin Laden blanch.

The sad statistics come from a white paper on E.U. transport published late last year, a study that also raises what might be called the collateral damage of so many accidents. The transport Commissioner, Spain's Loyola de Palacio, reckons this causes losses of some j45 billion, primarily in health and labor costs. Aside from the direct price of so much killing and maiming, traffic congestion adds many millions more euros in wasted fuel consumption, with its accompanying pollution. Earlier this year, in the Italian industrial region of Lombardy, air-particle counts five times the alert level were being recorded. That meant Italians in many cities, including Milan, were restricted to driving on alternate days, based on whether they have odd or even registration-plate numbers.

Apart from the risk of death, injury and exhaust-caused lung damage, being behind the wheel in many parts of the E.U. is a hazard to mental health. The frustration caused by sitting with the engine in neutral or first gear in a flashy metal box built to travel up to 200 km/h certainly contributes to road rage, the syndrome whereby Mr. Nice jumps out of his car as Mr. Nuts. The white paper calculates that each day 7,500 km of E.U. roads are like arteries clogged by cholesterol, at best sluggish, at worst blocked to standstill. Over the course of a year, that comes to more than 2.7 million km that you would, so to speak, kill to avoid motoring on. In 1970, drivers in today's E.U. countries boasted 62 million cars. Now there are 175 million, albeit with more and better roads to use them on.

The car has become at once something we can't live without and something akin to a global serial killer. As with aircraft, human error rather than mechanical failure is the prime cause of car crashes, typically exacerbated by speed or alcohol, and often both. Many people who love their god, their children and their job nevertheless drive as though there is no tomorrow, foot down, mobile phone to hand, rude and reckless kings and queens of the road. But for 40,000 E.U. citizens each year, the road ends. Peeled from asphalt, picked in pieces from twisted steel and plastic, body-bagged to a mortuary. Others learn that for the rest of their lives the only tires they'll steer are those of a wheelchair.

For every road death there are afterquakes, shocks that ripple out through families, offices, friends, public and private purses. Road trauma is also off-road trauma. Here's an example, I suspect a mere variation on the average 110 cases every day in the E.U. When I was an upstart of four, my father was traveling at night on a lonely road in Western Australia, his business colleague driving. A car came over a rise with its lights on high beam. Half-blinded, my father's colleague instinctively pulled off the road. He hit a parked trailer, almost sheering the car in half. My father died; the driver was unhurt. I don't know if the high-beamer even stopped.

My mother got some insurance. It helped to raise me and my two sisters, aged six and two at the time, while she went out to work. We managed. But what a waste. A man who had been a captain in the U.S. Marine Corps during World War II, surviving the horrors of the fighting on Guadalcanal, slaughtered because some twit driver forgot his dimmer switch. Over the half-century since that night, I've wondered what it might have been like to pronounce the word Dad rather than just write it.

The Transport Commission white paper throws up some interesting ideas, the aim being to slash the road toll by 2010. Among 60 proposals are common road signs throughout the 15 E.U. countries, common fines for similar offenses, tougher laws to protect cyclists, signaling frequent crash sites, more research into airbags and tires, fitting all cars with black boxes like those in aircraft. Sounds good. But doesn't it nearly all come down to attitude? One bumper sticker I remember from my youth in Australia just said, "Courtesy is Catching." It is. Another read, "Better late than dead on time." There are 40,000 good reasons to drink to that. Or not.