[sustran] Re: Driving in Bangalore

[Zvi Leve]

Many years ago I did some work on traffic safety and I happened to come 
across a very interesting article about "inexplicable" run-off-road 
accidents in Jordan. It was found that on the better quality roads, 
there were actually /more/ incidents of cars just "randomly" going off 
the road! The author decided that this could only be due to what he 
called the "magic carpet phenomenom": most Jordanian drivers (at the 
time at least) had very limited driving experience, and the car was very 
much considered a miracle device. The better the road quality, the more 
likely they were to feel that the car will "just drive itself" - a magic 
carpet if you will!

Anyway, I think that this concept applies in many rapidly developing 
areas where there are huge number of new drivers, as well as other road 
users who now have to contend with all these "miracle devices" zooming 
about everywhere. Surely education and standards are necessary, but 
there is no replacement for experience! And a bit of humour along the 
way certainly helps.

I once asked an Iranian colleague about his perspective on the accident 
rates in Teheran and his reply was: "If you physically cannot get from 
point A to point B, who really cares about road safety!" Which brings us 
back to the basic point of the new mobility agenda: what is the point of 
mobility, and can our needs be met with less mobility? At the end of the 
day, we are arguing about "quality of life", not quality of mobility.

Cheers,

Zvi


Alan Howes wrote:
> I find that Indians, unlike some others, have an excellent sense of
> humour and know not to take themselves too seriously.
>
> Though how one brings about an improvement in the awful driving
> standards here, which result in very high accident rates, is another
> matter.
>
> Regards, Alan (contact details in sig, currently in Dharavi bus depot,
> Mumbai, next to Asia's biggest slum ...)
>
>
>   
>