No romance on roads

Press, 4 May 1984, Page 12

No romance on roads

By

GWYNNE DYER,

in London

Everybody who has travelled in the developing countries knows that the most dangerous part of the journey is not the flight, but the road in from the airport. Only a tiny proportion of people in these countries drive vehicles, compared to the industrialised countries, but they have an amazing impact: more than a quarter-million people a year are killed in road accidents in the Third World. Latin America used to set the world standard for bad driving, but these days places like Mexico City and Rio have become too congested for the truly horrifying high-speed crashes to happen very often. There are still 56 deaths annually for each 10,000 cars in Mexico (compared to three deaths per 10,000 cars in the United States or Britain, and 3.6 per 10,000 cars in New Zealand), but the Latins have been overtaken by the Middle East, southern Asia, and, above all, Africa.

In a recent survey by the World Health Organisation, the 11 countries with the worst fatal accident rates were all in Africa, where the prevalent belief is that the only two relevant driving controls are

the accelerator and the horn. (Brakes are for sissies.) Nigeria currently tops the list, with an appalling 234 deaths annually for every 10,000 vehicles. Then there is the limiting case, Oman, where the annual death rate from accidents once amounted to 10 per cent of the car-owning population. Even in Oman things are gradually getting better, and they will go on improving with time. In all the developed countries, the number of people killed per car-mile has been falling for decades. In Britain, for example, 6700 people died on the roads in 1931, when there were only two million cars in the country. Last year, with 10 times as many vehicles on the road, only 5800 people were killed. Twice as many die each year in France, which has slightly fewer people — but then France is a much larger country, with three times as much road per car (and all the drivers are French). It is basically a question of experience. Almost everybody in Nigeria is a first-generation driver, almost everybody in Britain is second-generation, and

most are third. By that time the rules of common sense have been widely accepted by drivers, and for most people (except the very young) cars have become merely a means of transportation, not a wonderful new vehicle for expressing their personality and relieving their aggression. The differences of national style remain: Italians still drive much faster and more emotionally than Americans, but at least they now know how to do it, because they have had time to learn. Italians and Turks have exactly the same approach to driving, but only about a quarter as many Italians die of it, because the general level of competence there is so much higher.

Rotten driving does not make headlines, like war or famine, because the toll is daily and scattered, but the cost to the newer countries is horrendous. More people have died on Israel’s roads than in Israel’s wars, and it has been calculated that road accidents cost most Third World countries more than they receive in foreign aid.