Hi There,
One of the behavioural blindspots in every day policy making is to deal with road accidents. For every one who sits in a car is not really thinking about fatalities, accidents, and other mis-adventures on the road. Comparative global road accident statistics do not make for a happy contemplation. This also becomes important as one of the most important goals in SDG is to halve traffic fatalities, and injuries by 2030 (SDG 3.6).
The explosion of motoring in early part of last century was one of the quintessential defining features of the age. People took to motoring slowly but quite steadily. Once the distances that one could go without breaking down increased, we had the age of the car. This eventually did lead to accidents, and slowly accidents became a contentious problem for the advocates of the nascent car industry. However, as the number of cars were low it was not a huge public problem, not when there were other more pressing matters to attend to.
Sometime around the beginning of the 1940's number of motor vehicles started increasing, number of accidents went up as well. One interesting feature was that the roads were not really made keeping in mind the powerful engines. They were still in the age of carriages or more animal powered and staid speed outputs. Let me make my point by referring to the iconic North by Northwest which came out in 1959 and was an unwitting reflection of the un-safe road conditions employed as a thrilling trope by Alfred Hitchcock.
In the film Cary Grant has been mistaken for someone else and kidnapped by two thugs. Who intend to finish him off, in order to do that they ensure he has a strong drink in him and put him behind the wheels of a powerful car at the edge of a hill. The edge of the road as was customary at that point of time was unmarked. The film has centre lines painted in white though they were far from standardised. Although the first centre line came up in the motor city Detroit in 1911, they were as yet not a priority as vehicular accidents were seen largely as part and parcel of the speed age. To a certain extent this might have been true as the speed laws, traffic rules, and most importantly road signs were decades in the future.
There is however no doubt that the feature on the roads that we take for granted today, the marked lines on the edge and centre considerably reduced fatalities and injuries. The transition from white lines to yellow in centre was due to an interesting psychological insight apparently we pay more attention to the glowing yellow in the dark. The edge lines however continued to remain largely missing away from large cities. Primarily due to less traffic and negligence on the part of the local bodies in demanding better road infrastructure.
The simple act of painting lines on road save thousands of life. It also made possible innovation in road construction which made roads very safe for motorists and pedestrians however in the last two decades the road safety issues have started coming up again as the average speed the world over increases, and lack of trauma care at or near the site of accidents make it hard for achieving the goal of SDG 3.6.
Just like the painted lines saved a lot of lives and were made possible by active research. In 1970 Potters Industries the makers of the reflective glass beads used for road safety calculated that driving on an unmarked rural road in the dark was six times deadlier than driving on a busy urban road during the day. We need more psychological backed insight to ensure that people wear seat-belts while while being driven and driving, follow speed protocols and do not drink and drive.
The Chinese state has used an interesting epidemiological perspective to reduce road accidents, notable in this has been the work of a research group at the Sanlian Road Safety Institute, they use a tree model for understanding and reducing road accidents. The core of this model is to understand the key behaviour of motorists before legislating and rule making.
Sanlian Accident Prevention Institute has devised a plan to change the habits of acccident-prone drivers. AP, accident-prone (The road to reducing traffic accidents in China, SCIENCE,AAAS, 2020).
In other geographies as well the behaviour induced understanding of road accidents has to be introduced, and we need to find our new paint on the road insight which is efficacious, in-expensive, and unlike the Chinese model less intrusive. For anyone who has driven in China the glare of the road cameras are a driving nightmare.
