Roads don’t kill

You only had to see the photographs to know the meaning of the word “Totalled”. Set some weeks apart and on different roads, both looked like the same cruel picture of a car which had seemingly gone into the jaws of a compactor. However, the one from just last week was being driven by a 22-year old accompanied by four friends, the oldest of whom was 25. It was a wreck on Mumbai’s Western Express Highway, the road we all take to the airport. The other, taken a few weeks earlier, was on the newer Eastern Freeway and involved a family. No matter: the bodies must have looked identical — not human bodies at all, but crushed lives, the mortal remains probably having to be scraped off the metal and upholstery that remained.

If that sounds gruesome, it was. Both accidents were due to speeding in excess of 120 kmph, complete madness on roads which aren’t made for reckless speeding. The Western Express Highway, in fact, has a variety of vehicles plying on it and also has crossroads and traffic lights, none of which lend themselves to speed driving. The Eastern Freeway is an elevated road which bypasses many of Mumbai’s worst cross roads and, thus, provides a fast link between the city’s central business district and its eastern suburb. Sadly, in non-peak hours the relative freedom it provides is taken as an invitation to racing by many wanton motorists.

In each of these accidents — and this really goes without saying — all occupants were killed. The totalled cars tell you that no amount of safety features like seat belts, air bags, reinforced and impact absorbing front end, would serve any purpose. Accidents like these defy any safety regulations or preventive features. Quite predictably, newspapers headlined the incidents as “Killer Roads”.

But would you blame the roads or the people driving on them (Incidentally, a solution which always comes up after a high-speed accident is to install speed breakers, forgetting that this measure defeats the very purpose of building such roads).

Our law-making is a slow and cumbersome process. The British had introduced a Motor Vehicles Act in 1939, when cars and other motorised vehicles were a rare feature of our roads. A revised Motor Vehicles Act was brought in 1988. The progression, if that is the word, of road fatalities, had meanwhile gone up from 6,500 in 1968 to over 36,000 in 1988. The figure was over 1,50,000 deaths last year which translates to 400 deaths per day which, in turn, means 1 life snuffed out every 3.6 minutes. Uttar Pradesh has the dubious distinction of being in the lead with 17,666 killed last year, followed by Tamil Nadu with 15,642 and Maharashtra with 13,212.

If we take road fatalities per one lakh motor vehicles, which is a true indicator of the accident rate, and compare countries with a sizeable number of cars, India figures rather poorly. Our figure is 130.1 deaths, whereas China, that is said to have bad driving habits, scores 104.6. But just compare that with the figures for countries with a huge number of cars where — and this is important — vehicular traffic moves quickly: Denmark (6.7), France (7.6), Germany (6.8), Italy (7.3), Japan (6.5), Sweden (4.7), Switzerland (4.7), UK (5.1) and America (12.9). The last figure is instructive because the US has the highest density of cars in the world and its citizens are completely dependent on them for transportation. They drive long distances very fast, yet their road fatalities per one lakh vehicles is less than a tenth of ours!

The reasons are many, yet obvious to all.

The Road Transport and Safety Bill 2015, one of Narendra Modi government’s first pieces of legislation, seems to be facing stiff opposition. At first glance this seems astonishing, because the bill tries to make road safety enforceable by the use of modern technology, it makes it mandatory for safety features in cars to go across car models, so that cheaper variants have the same features as the expensive ones. It also tries to enforce a point system of penalties for driving offences and so on.

The opposition is apolitical and has come from vested interest. States with car manufacturing plants have opposed the safety features. Associations of truck owners have opposed sections which make owners liable for overloading of trucks, which often causes accidents, and also for making drivers stay on the road for extra-long hours. All of us know that regional transport offices are understaffed and overloaded, but this is the way they want it to stay, because then there’s only a cursory driving test before a licence is issued (even this can be waived with the right connections). I recently got myself “tested” for a licence. All I was required to do was drive in a straight line for 500m unaccompanied, while an RTO staffer stood at the end waiting to mark all of us “passed”.

When he was chief minister of Maharashtra, Prithviraj Chauhan had announced that driving simulators would be installed at all RTOs. These are used all over the world — you sit at a console which simulates driving conditions including sudden emergencies. Your driving skills and reaction time gets tested, as do your ability to avoid collisions and errant pedestrians. Each simulator costs around `7 lakh. Only two were installed and neither is being used. Why would they be If tests are automated and results cannot be manipulated, how will the RTO staff survive Incidentally, many people whom I know to have been driving for years in India, failed the UK driving test, not once but multiple times. That’s hardly surprising.

In addition to bad drivers what also causes accidents is lack of law enforcement. When drunk driving rules were made stringent, people began to be careful. Yet, one can see that people are back to their old ways because there just aren’t enough policemen to check drunk driving.

Why isn’t the huge amount of money collected from numerous vehicle taxes used primarily on just these two measures, instead of being thrown into the insatiable Consolidated Fund of India

Better staffed RTOs with stringent driving tests and a large number of traffic policemen is all we need to bring our accident rate down dramatically.

Then our roads will no longer be the vicious killers they are today.

The writer is a senior journalist