This strange equation has become known as Smeed’s law, after a 1949 paper, humbly titled “Some Statistical Aspects of Road Safety Research,” by the British statistician and road-safety expert R. J. Smeed. What Smeed’s law showed was that, across a number of countries, ranging from the United States to New Zealand, the number of people killed on the roads tended to rise as the number of cars on the road began to rise—up to a point—and then, gradually if not totally uniformly, the fatality rates began to drop, as, generally, did the absolute numbers of fatalities.
Smeed suspected that two things were going on: One, as the number of deaths grows higher, so too do people begin to clamor for something to be done about it (as began to happen in the United States in the 1960s, when fatalities were topping 50,000 people a year). Second, Smeed proposed that a sort of national learning curve was at work. The more cars on the road, the more people are “growing up” and learning how to sort out the problems of traffic—with better highway engineering, stronger laws, safer vehicles, and a more developed traffic culture itself (and perhaps more congestion, which tends to lower traffic fatalities).
In China, one sees things that make the hair stand on end—like bicycles traveling on restricted highways, scooter drivers carrying several children without helmets, and drivers stopping on the highway to urinate—but presumably, a number of years down the road, these things will largely be only memories. The dynamics of Smeed’s law may help explain a curious phenomenon noted by Rong Jiang, a Beijing Institute of Technology transportation engineer. Studies had suggested that the crash rate was actually higher on the high-speed, divided “luxury roads” of the new China, he said, than on the two-lane rural highways. This is exactly the opposite of what happens almost everywhere else. He suspected that drivers were not adequately trained for the new high-speed roads. “The drivers were used to low speed on the open road,” he explained. “But if they travel along the freeway, they keep the same habits. If their vehicle has a malfunction they will just park on the shoulder, without any alerting equipment. There are many such collisions.”
Smeed’s law, if history serves as a guide, is why one cannot simply look at the current horrific numbers of road deaths in countries like China and India and the relatively low levels of car ownership and assume that fatalities will continue to rise proportionally as more people get more cars. It may seem hard to imagine, but there is already progress of sorts even in China’s massive death toll: While more people are dying on China’s roads than ever before, the Chinese fatality rate, as measured in number of deaths per thousand registered vehicles, has actually been dropping.
Smeed’s law is complicated, however, by a few factors that make China and India different from the countries Smeed considered. The first is that most people dying in traffic in the developing world are dying not in cars but outside cars. More than half of the people killed on the road in the United States are drivers or passengers, whereas in a country such as Kenya the figure can be as low as 10 percent. In Delhi, the occupants of cars represent only 5 percent of fatalities, while pedestrians, cyclists, and motorcyclists make up a staggering 80 percent. In places like the United States and England, motorization was an evolutionary process. However novel they may have been, the first automobiles, the “horseless carriages,” could still be understood in terms of what had come before. The speeds were slow, the number of cars few.
China and India, by contrast, are seeing a vast flood of modern cars surging onto what are, in some cases, premodern roads. The Lexus and the rickshaw are thrust onto the same thoroughfare. Another consequence of this dizzyingly fast motorization is that people of all ages who have never before driven in their lives are being put on the road at once. In 2004 it was estimated that nearly one out of every seven drivers on the road in Beijing was a novice. The rapidly evolving Chinese insurance industry was dealing with customers who were reporting as many as thirty claims in a multiyear period. Some insurers reported accident risk for certain classes of individuals at nearly 100 percent—virtually moving them from the category of “accident risk” to the paradoxical “accident certainty.”
In the harsh language of economics, the massive traffic fatalities and unsafe road systems in developing countries might be seen as temporarily necessary “negative externalities.” In other words, like pollution or poor working conditions, they are just another price those countries have to pay in order to “catch up.” Indeed, one might read the frenetic traffic behavior as somehow expressing the soul of noisy, dirty, clamoring entrepreneurial and industrial cities. Calm and safe traffic, the argument might go, is fine for those who can afford it (e.g., Switzerland). Let us get the cars and motorcycles on the road first, let us get people commuting to jobs, and then we can worry about safety. This is why, even as the rates for things like diseases begin to drop as countries get wealthier, traffic fatalities—a “disease of development”—rise until that point, as formulated by Smeed’s law, where they begin to drop. When East Germany was reunited with West Germany in 1990, the traffic fatality rate in the former Communist country quadrupled: More people bought cars, drove them more often, and at higher speeds (the East German speed limit of 100 kilometers per hour on autobahns was raised to West Germany’s 130). While the fatality rate is still higher in the eastern half of the country, it began to drop again after 1991.
It is eerily striking how closely fatalities can be tracked in economic terms. A country’s motorization rate is linked in a somewhat linear fashion to its gross domestic product: the more money, the more cars. Researchers use the rough benchmark of a $5,000 per capita GDP as the point at which car ownership rates begin to accelerate. As work by the World Bank economists Elizabeth Kopits and Maureen Cropper shows, countries with very low GDPs have low numbers of fatalities per population (there are simply not that many cars, even if the rates per vehicle might be high). As the GDP grows, there is a sharp upward curve in fatalities. The rate per vehicle begins to drop with minor increments in the GDP—for example, when per capita GDP climbs from $1,200 to $4,400, the fatality risk per vehicle drops by a factor of three. After studying the data from eighty-eight countries from 1963 to 1999, Kopits and Cropper concluded that the fatalities per person begin to drop only when a country’s GDP hits $8,600 (in 1985 dollars); they eventually hit levels lower than those of countries with much smaller per capita GDPs. Projecting these numbers outward, Kopits and Cropper concluded that India, for example, where the GDP (using that same 1985 standard) was $2,900 in 2000, will not see its road death rate decline until 2042.
Must this be so? Must history be a guide, must it preordain the future? Must that many people die on the roads? When one compares the rankings of per capita GDP and the traffic fatality rate, they gloomily do seem to correspond. Norway, for example, ranked as having the world’s third-highest GDP in 2005 by the International Monetary Fund, was among the world’s top three countries that year in terms of traffic safety. Uganda, on the other hand, ranked 154th in the world in terms of GDP, has one of the world’s highest traffic fatality rates, some 160 deaths per 10,000 vehicles (a rate that will presumably rise, up to a point, as its GDP rises). The reasons are not hard to understand: lower-quality roads and infrastructure, fewer hospitals and doctors, less-safe vehicles. In Nigeria, where the buses are nicknamed “moving morgues” and “flying coffins,” the situation was summed up by one commuter: “Many of us know most of the buses are death traps but since we can’t afford the expensive taxi fares, we have no choice but to use the buses.”
Sometimes, however, countries that have very similar levels of GDP can have varying levels of traffic risk. One of the most striking cases of this involves Belgium and the Netherlands. They are virtually identical in per capita GDP, but in Belgium, the traffic fatality rate is more than twice as high as the Netherlands (even though life expectancy itself is slightly higher in Belgium). These two countries share a border, even a language—why should Belgium be so much more dangerous? Perhaps it has to do with population den
sity. Studies have shown that the less densely populated a place, the higher the risk of traffic fatalities. And, it turns out, the Netherlands crams more people into less space, while the Belgians have more room to roam. The nonfatal crash rate, on the other hand, is usually higher in more densely populated places: There are more people to run into. In Belgium that rate, too, was nearly twice as high as in the Netherlands. What about motorization levels? The higher the level of motorization, the more the fatality risk tends to drop—but where the Netherlands had only 422 vehicles per thousand people in 1999, Belgium had 522. Traffic laws might seem a good explanation, except that both Belgium and the Netherlands have similar speed limits and blood alcohol concentration restrictions.
So why is Belgium a more dangerous place to drive? An answer of sorts may be found in another kind of index, one that more or less aligns with the GDP but often diverges in interesting ways: corruption. According to indices compiled by the anticorruption watchdog Transparency International, the Netherlands was ranked number nine in 2006, while Belgium appeared much farther down the list, at number twenty.
What does this have to do with traffic? Most people tend to think of corruption by the standard definition of the use of public office for private gain. Working out from that, however, we might consider corruption as being indicative of a larger lack of faith in the law. In his book Why People Obey the Law, the legal scholar Tom Tyler posits that people generally comply with laws less because they are deterred by the penalties of not doing so, or because they have calculated it’s in their best self-interest, and more because they think it’s the right thing to do. Yet they are more likely to think it is the right thing, argues Tyler, if they perceive that the legal authorities are legitimate. People who go to traffic court, Tyler found, are less concerned with the outcome—even when it is a costly ticket or fine—than with the fairness of the process. When there is less respect for the law, there is a lesser cost (or greater gain) for not following it. Less effective governance means that laws are less effective, which means that people are less likely to follow them.
In Belgium, it may be no coincidence that the country both ranks comparatively poorer on the corruption index and has a public that seems less interested in following traffic laws. Lode Vereeck, a Belgian economist at Hasselt University, has noted that in survey after survey of people’s attitudes toward traffic regulations, Belgians seem resistant; they’re more hostile than their neighbors to things like seat-belt laws, lower speed limits, and drunk-driving laws (and also more likely to drink before driving, if surveys can be believed). At the same time, according to Vereeck, the number of violations recorded by Belgian police dropped from 1993 to 1999—even though Belgium’s roads clearly did not get safer. A driver was also less likely to get a traffic fine in Belgium than in its neighbor to the north: The Netherlands, with roughly 50 percent more people (and a lower motorization rate), issued nearly eight times the number of tickets in 2000.
While the laws in Belgium and the Netherlands may be similar, it seems there is a different attitude to following and enforcing those laws. Some researchers have argued that Belgium’s system of yielding at unmarked intersections, known as priorité de droite, or “yield to the right,” is the real reason for Belgium’s extraordinary fatality rates. But most of these intersections are in urban areas, which typically see nonfatal crashes. In any case, the priorité de droite itself simply speaks to the larger issue: a resistance against regulation (in the form of stop signs or traffic lights) and a lack of interest in following the existing rules. As the examples in Chapter 7 pointed out, traffic can be made to move well and safely with no signs at all, if strong enough social norms are in place.
The nations that rank as the least corrupt—such countries as Finland, Norway, New Zealand, Sweden, and Singapore—are also the safest places in the world to drive. Sweden, of course, practically oozes safety, from its flagship Volvos to its “Vision Zero” policy, which seeks the eventual elimination of all traffic fatalities (it passed this even after it already had the world’s lowest traffic fatality rate). The British traffic psychologist Ian Walker tells the story about how a group of researchers equipped a car with cameras and got a group of Swedish military conscripts to drive around for a while. The purpose was to see how having passengers would affect a recruit’s driving. “They thought, Put four young guys in a car and give them free rein—they’ll go nuts,” Walker says. “Actually, the guys were saying, ‘Careful, slow down.’”
In Finland, which has one of the lowest crash rates in the world, drivers are given fines based on a complicated calculus primarily involving their after-tax income. The law, intended to counter the regressive nature of speeding tickets (they take up a larger part of a poor person’s income than a rich person’s), has led to some very high-profile speeding tickets, such as Internet entrepreneur Jaakko Rytsölä’s $71,400 tab for going 43 miles per hour in a 25-mile-per-hour zone. There has been some grumbling, especially among the wealthy, but the law remains popular; in 2001, the legislature overwhelmingly rejected a cap on fines. Women seem to find the fine more fair than men (this is interesting for several reasons, which I will return to shortly). But what’s remarkable about sliding-scale speeding tickets is not necessarily whether they get people to slow down. It’s that in Finland legislators have the confidence to pass laws that unilaterally impose high costs on breaking the law, that traffic police will actually issue the fines rather than accept what in theory could be a huge bribe, and that the public, by and large, feels all this is fair.
It’s true that Norway and Sweden are among the wealthiest countries in the world and, having taken care of the basic needs of their societies (e.g., getting everyone food and running water, establishing political stability), they can move on to things like safer roads. But as the case of Belgium shows, GDP itself is not necessarily a predictor for the safeness of the roads. France, traditionally one of the more dangerous countries in Europe to drive in, lowered the number of people killed on its roads from 7,721 in 2001 to just under 5,000 in 2005. It is not as if the French GDP soared during this period; in fact, it was rather stagnant.
What France did was buy Breathalyzers and automated speed cameras by the thousands and overhaul its points system for violations. It brought accountability to a system that had been plagued by chronic traffic ticket “fixing.” (One study found that a third of the male employees at a national utility company had had tickets fixed and that those who had were also more likely to have been in a crash). Ticket fixing is so endemic in France that starting in 1958, incoming presidents declared amnesty on a range of traffic violations, from minor to fairly serious—a rather self-defeating measure that itself has been blamed for hundreds of traffic fatalities. The traffic-ticket holiday was curtailed by Jacques Chirac and seems to be on its way out altogether. France, in at least one way, is becoming less corrupt (indeed, it did drop a few places on the index during those same years).
The lesson is that wealth seems to affect traffic fatalities but corruption may affect them even more. It could just be that lifting GDP lowers corruption and traffic fatalities. But a study by a group of U.S. economists concluded that the statistical relationship between corruption (as measured by the International Country Risk Guide) and traffic fatalities was actually stronger than the link between income and traffic fatalities. What they were saying, essentially, is that money is not enough. Even when countries become wealthy enough to start shifting attention to things like traffic safety, one still needs credible laws and credible people to enforce the laws. New Zealand, which is one of the five least corrupt countries in the world, is below countries like Austria and Spain in GDP but has safer roads, as measured by fatalities per 10,000 vehicles. Russia, on the other hand, is ranked as more corrupt than other countries at similar development levels, and its roads reflect that fact: Moscow is filled with notoriously corrupt traffic cops and cars blazing through traffic jams with ersatz blue sirens. Russia itself reportedly accounts for two-thirds of
Europe’s road fatalities.
The complex question of why poorer countries seem to suffer from more corruption and whether that corruption is a bad thing in itself has long been debated among economists and social scientists. Some argue that “efficient corruption” is a useful and necessary cost of rapid economic development, that bribes and rule skirting can be used to outwit creaky centralized bureaucracies. Others counter that corrupt politicians are not necessarily faster politicians, in terms of hustling development projects through, and may actually slow things down to get even more money. Corruption is a brake on development, they say. Countries like China, which are booming and have relatively widespread corruption, could be developing even faster if corruption were tamed, they contend. The first group argues that a system in which firms have to pay kickbacks to corrupt government officials means that the firm with the most “efficient” bid will also be able to afford the highest bribe, while the second group maintains that this system rewards inefficient firms. Daniel Kaufmann, an economist with the World Bank and a leading critic of corruption, uses the example of a firm that was disqualified because its bid was beneath the acceptable “minimum.”
With traffic, it’s arguably corruption that gets in the way of economic growth, not the other way around. While no economist would view a traffic jam as an efficient use of resources, traffic congestion can symbolize the economic vitality of a country (simply because miles driven usually increase in stronger economic times). “Bad” traffic can be seen as just an outcome of that success. But corruption itself can cause traffic problems, the sort that represent a drain on economic growth, not an outcome. Take, for example, the myriad roadblocks that are a daily fact of life in many developing countries. The process typically has little to do with vehicle inspection or safety and a lot to do with police or soldiers trying to extract something “for the boys.” Corruption does not speed a driver’s way through some bureaucratic tangle; rather, the tangle is formed because of corruption.
Traffic Page 30