Road Safety - This topic has come up in numerous discussions all over the world but the one thing people get wrong is that they think it all depends on the infrastructure - The zebra crossings, the traffic lights, etc. but in fact it isn't because the one hard fact about road safety is that no matter how good the infrastructure is, it is the drivers which make a road safe to travel on.
Even if there is a traffic light, it won't matter if the driver doesn't stop when its red, even if there is a zebra crossing, it won't matter if the driver doesn't stop when someone is crossing the road. Now I don't mean to say that the infrastructure doesn't play any role, what I am saying is that the driver plays a major role. Now a good example of this would be to compare crossing roads for a pedestrian in India and in Germany:
In India on a typical busy street you can hardly find any crossings and even if you do, the cars won't stop for you, which makes crossing the road a dangerous task.
In Germany on the other hand there are crossings that you can easily find and if not all, most have some kind of button you can push which activated the red light for cars after some time, and the cars will stop. Even if the road crossing has no zebra crossing or red light, when a driver sees a pedestrian on a road crossing they will stop.
We can clearly see that along with infrastructure it is the reaction of the driver that also makes a road safe or dangerous.
According to the World Health Organisation, India had the second highest number of road fatalities in the world in 2010, standing at 231, 027. This might be related to how easy it is to pass the driving test. According to an interviewee who appeared on BBC Top Gear you don’t have to take a driving test in India. Instead you can pay a couple thousand rupees to an out of state driving agent and you get an out of state licence which is valid all over the country. However these interviews are relatively old and nowadays the government has stricter rules insuring that everyone gives the driving test fairly.
And then there is road design. Often what happened is that we have congested roads because of poor design and the weather. Many roads don't have enough capacity and aren't wide enough to support the enormous number of vehicles using the road. The weather should not be seen as an excuse for having roads dotted with potholes and cracks, but instead as another reason to have better road design.
All in all we all play a role in keeping the roads safe for others and ourselves, we should always follow the traffic rules.
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