Reduce Unsafety
India is building about 300 km. of roads every month and the target is about twice that rate. Headlines blare that Delhi and Agra have come closer to each other, to about two hours, thanks to the Yamuna Expressway.
In 2009, we topped the world in an inglorious statistics: people dying on roads in accidents. The situation in the second half of 2012 maybe underlined by this fact: the day after the Yamuna Expressway was opened, there was at least one fatal accident on it.
The incongruence is hard to miss. You may reach Agra from Delhi faster, but not necessarily alive. It is very clear that on the first, we are talking about the rate of increase and development of our road network. This is the way to go. We need to cut the travel time between economic centers and also between economic and population centers. We also need to integrate the economic-outliers, mainly rural areas, with the productivity-mainstream. We need to speed up road building and network development.
But, we need to do all that while reducing the accident rates to match the developed world situation. We cannot have road networks of the developed world with bottom-trawling safety statistics.
The above is, obviously a No Go. So, then, what is the Go?
Speedy safety
During the supposedly accelerated Indian road network development initiative, the Golden Quadrilateral and all that (which compares with China’s as a snail does with a cheetah), safety outcomes have severely disappointed with several deficiencies, like lack of traffic safety management, engineering, education, enforcement and emergency medical services contributing to the enervating environment.
The above list of causal factors that makes Indian roads unsafe across the hierarchy indicate the range of measures to be taken to reach levels of safety that go beyond zero accidents. The accident statistics are, in a sense, reactive measures. You wait for an accident and then mark it. And, in extreme cases, we beat our breasts, criticize everyone and sundry, the government pays out compensation to the victims; only till the next accident, of course.
What it means to go beyond zero in safety is to reduce accident potential zero; not be satisfied with zero-accident statistics. Statistics vis-à-vis potential. But, we cannot sacrifice productivity in the name of safety. We have to get there from here on time and fast.
Everyone, starting from the planners all the way down to the pedestrians who also have a legitimate claim to road use, with the designers, people who operate and maintain roads, and vehicles coming in between, contributes to unsafety while giving the nod to the economic necessity of speed.
Speed is the main reason behind accidents. A 5% increase in average speed leads to approximately 10% increase in crashes that cause injuries, and a 20% increase in fatal crashes. Over the past 20 years, road accidents have been increasing around 2 to 4% per year due to lack of political commitment, absence of sound policy on road safety, heavy motorization and lack of speed management. Combine the two sets of statistics and you will be scratching your head as to how you are alive!
Speed alone does not kill. The speed-accident-fatality statistics has to be set in the context of design and maintenance of roads, people behavior, training, speed control and monitoring, vehicle technologies, accident response system, and legal and institutional frameworks. Only the precise alignment of the above factors can lead to our roads becoming pro-actively safe.
Reduce Negative Externalities
We have to adopt a multi-pronged approach – technological, behavioral, sociological and institutional. These have to be developed along distinct pathways but without each being pigeon-holed; aligned, yet not parallel. Minimize negative externalities.
Motorists should not be surprised by the sudden appearance of a bullock cart crossing the road, clearly a design issue. The bullock cart crosses the road because there is no other facility for it to go over to the other side. The need is, in one sense, internal to the design – lack of appreciation of community needs. But, it is also external, as providing such a crossing facility calls for additional resources; a matter of prioritizing resource allocation. Sociological and institutional perspectives intrude into the discussion space.
Unless road designers internalize safety in their designs, the design will always include negative externalities. What goes for bullock carts, goes for pedestrians, both in the rural stretches of fast corridors and on urban roads. There is a demand for foot over bridges across a fast corridor. The planner and the designer should accommodate the demand, but they can do so only if it has been provided for in the resource basket. Providing resources and designing are two distinct pathways for safety, yet influencing each other.
We must think why too often we hear, “the driver lost control of the vehicle, ran over the median …” and that resulted in so many people killed / injured. Typically, it is because of lax maintenance of vehicles. But, is that all there is to it? When it comes to trucks, lax maintenance may not necessarily mean not adhering to the schedule. Rather, the schedule could be wrong within the business perspective of the truck operator.
If the vehicle is consistently driven overloaded, say by 10 or 20 percent, the norms of the maintenance schedule must be underestimating the requirements in multiples of that percentage – just think brakes. Only by providing weigh bridges and strengthening the institutional mechanisms through appropriate legislative measures can we even hope to reduce instances of drivers losing control of vehicles. The above goes for drunk driving too; the biological overloading behind drivers losing control!
There are enough technology measures and developments that are finding their way into road safety. However, there are frequent incidences of safety being compromised on account of increasing technological complexities in the vehicles themselves. The most recent case involves the power window operation in cars of a particular manufacturer. But, this is no call against going to the barebones, technology-deficient cars of yesteryears. Rather, the focus should be on reducing the externalities of technological complexities. We need to pinpoint the problems rather than condemn technology; to be a Luddite is no pointer to safety.
Many technology measures do indeed improve travel speeds. One may mention speed tables, instead of speed breakers, in the turning channels at major road intersections. But, in the absence of awareness drives as to why speed tables and not speed breakers and the rules governing their use, the situation becomes more dangerous, as I have personally noticed. I can hazard a guess that not many drivers have even noticed these! That is the level of awareness, rather lack of it, we have to tackle while thinking on road safety.
Advice is given repeatedly not to talk on the mobile phone while driving. This advice is observed more in the breach, just as the mandatory helmet rule is. These are issues of education, sociological dimensions in the discussion on safety.
All of these are externalities because they have repercussions for people other than those who indulge in them. How many ever times the above have been repeated they merit further repetition till all the externalities are internalized, by road planners and designers, the policy makers, road users, vehicle manufacturers, indeed all of society.
To Conclude
A number of points, with the flavor of being minor aspects of road safety and distributed widely within the safety envelope, have been made in the above. One may think that these would not lead to the kind of shifts in the safety paradigm that we are looking for. Yet, we must remember that accidents are, in a sense, unfortunate coming together of a host of negative externalities, big and small.
No two accidents are exactly the same. The causal factors are typically different sets of negative externalities that occupy difficult to access niches and in varying combinations. We have to access these corners and extirpate them. The more these are reduced towards their eventual extinction, the more robust the paradigm. No, I am not denying that there is a significant role for high-level safety interventions. But, in the interest of achieving safety on our roads, we need to net the big as well as the small fish.
The individual measures, small drops as they be, have the potential to add up to a torrent. This is precisely how we can step up the ladder of road safety, one rung at a time. Remove the potential for accidents. The only way to be safer beyond zero accidents.
Safety on the roads; Safe tea at home!
Raghuram Ekambaram
India is building about 300 km. of roads every month and the target is about twice that rate. Headlines blare that Delhi and Agra have come closer to each other, to about two hours, thanks to the Yamuna Expressway.
In 2009, we topped the world in an inglorious statistics: people dying on roads in accidents. The situation in the second half of 2012 maybe underlined by this fact: the day after the Yamuna Expressway was opened, there was at least one fatal accident on it.
The incongruence is hard to miss. You may reach Agra from Delhi faster, but not necessarily alive. It is very clear that on the first, we are talking about the rate of increase and development of our road network. This is the way to go. We need to cut the travel time between economic centers and also between economic and population centers. We also need to integrate the economic-outliers, mainly rural areas, with the productivity-mainstream. We need to speed up road building and network development.
But, we need to do all that while reducing the accident rates to match the developed world situation. We cannot have road networks of the developed world with bottom-trawling safety statistics.
The above is, obviously a No Go. So, then, what is the Go?
Speedy safety
During the supposedly accelerated Indian road network development initiative, the Golden Quadrilateral and all that (which compares with China’s as a snail does with a cheetah), safety outcomes have severely disappointed with several deficiencies, like lack of traffic safety management, engineering, education, enforcement and emergency medical services contributing to the enervating environment.
The above list of causal factors that makes Indian roads unsafe across the hierarchy indicate the range of measures to be taken to reach levels of safety that go beyond zero accidents. The accident statistics are, in a sense, reactive measures. You wait for an accident and then mark it. And, in extreme cases, we beat our breasts, criticize everyone and sundry, the government pays out compensation to the victims; only till the next accident, of course.
What it means to go beyond zero in safety is to reduce accident potential zero; not be satisfied with zero-accident statistics. Statistics vis-à-vis potential. But, we cannot sacrifice productivity in the name of safety. We have to get there from here on time and fast.
Everyone, starting from the planners all the way down to the pedestrians who also have a legitimate claim to road use, with the designers, people who operate and maintain roads, and vehicles coming in between, contributes to unsafety while giving the nod to the economic necessity of speed.
Speed is the main reason behind accidents. A 5% increase in average speed leads to approximately 10% increase in crashes that cause injuries, and a 20% increase in fatal crashes. Over the past 20 years, road accidents have been increasing around 2 to 4% per year due to lack of political commitment, absence of sound policy on road safety, heavy motorization and lack of speed management. Combine the two sets of statistics and you will be scratching your head as to how you are alive!
Speed alone does not kill. The speed-accident-fatality statistics has to be set in the context of design and maintenance of roads, people behavior, training, speed control and monitoring, vehicle technologies, accident response system, and legal and institutional frameworks. Only the precise alignment of the above factors can lead to our roads becoming pro-actively safe.
Reduce Negative Externalities
We have to adopt a multi-pronged approach – technological, behavioral, sociological and institutional. These have to be developed along distinct pathways but without each being pigeon-holed; aligned, yet not parallel. Minimize negative externalities.
Motorists should not be surprised by the sudden appearance of a bullock cart crossing the road, clearly a design issue. The bullock cart crosses the road because there is no other facility for it to go over to the other side. The need is, in one sense, internal to the design – lack of appreciation of community needs. But, it is also external, as providing such a crossing facility calls for additional resources; a matter of prioritizing resource allocation. Sociological and institutional perspectives intrude into the discussion space.
Unless road designers internalize safety in their designs, the design will always include negative externalities. What goes for bullock carts, goes for pedestrians, both in the rural stretches of fast corridors and on urban roads. There is a demand for foot over bridges across a fast corridor. The planner and the designer should accommodate the demand, but they can do so only if it has been provided for in the resource basket. Providing resources and designing are two distinct pathways for safety, yet influencing each other.
We must think why too often we hear, “the driver lost control of the vehicle, ran over the median …” and that resulted in so many people killed / injured. Typically, it is because of lax maintenance of vehicles. But, is that all there is to it? When it comes to trucks, lax maintenance may not necessarily mean not adhering to the schedule. Rather, the schedule could be wrong within the business perspective of the truck operator.
If the vehicle is consistently driven overloaded, say by 10 or 20 percent, the norms of the maintenance schedule must be underestimating the requirements in multiples of that percentage – just think brakes. Only by providing weigh bridges and strengthening the institutional mechanisms through appropriate legislative measures can we even hope to reduce instances of drivers losing control of vehicles. The above goes for drunk driving too; the biological overloading behind drivers losing control!
There are enough technology measures and developments that are finding their way into road safety. However, there are frequent incidences of safety being compromised on account of increasing technological complexities in the vehicles themselves. The most recent case involves the power window operation in cars of a particular manufacturer. But, this is no call against going to the barebones, technology-deficient cars of yesteryears. Rather, the focus should be on reducing the externalities of technological complexities. We need to pinpoint the problems rather than condemn technology; to be a Luddite is no pointer to safety.
Many technology measures do indeed improve travel speeds. One may mention speed tables, instead of speed breakers, in the turning channels at major road intersections. But, in the absence of awareness drives as to why speed tables and not speed breakers and the rules governing their use, the situation becomes more dangerous, as I have personally noticed. I can hazard a guess that not many drivers have even noticed these! That is the level of awareness, rather lack of it, we have to tackle while thinking on road safety.
Advice is given repeatedly not to talk on the mobile phone while driving. This advice is observed more in the breach, just as the mandatory helmet rule is. These are issues of education, sociological dimensions in the discussion on safety.
All of these are externalities because they have repercussions for people other than those who indulge in them. How many ever times the above have been repeated they merit further repetition till all the externalities are internalized, by road planners and designers, the policy makers, road users, vehicle manufacturers, indeed all of society.
To Conclude
A number of points, with the flavor of being minor aspects of road safety and distributed widely within the safety envelope, have been made in the above. One may think that these would not lead to the kind of shifts in the safety paradigm that we are looking for. Yet, we must remember that accidents are, in a sense, unfortunate coming together of a host of negative externalities, big and small.
No two accidents are exactly the same. The causal factors are typically different sets of negative externalities that occupy difficult to access niches and in varying combinations. We have to access these corners and extirpate them. The more these are reduced towards their eventual extinction, the more robust the paradigm. No, I am not denying that there is a significant role for high-level safety interventions. But, in the interest of achieving safety on our roads, we need to net the big as well as the small fish.
The individual measures, small drops as they be, have the potential to add up to a torrent. This is precisely how we can step up the ladder of road safety, one rung at a time. Remove the potential for accidents. The only way to be safer beyond zero accidents.
Safety on the roads; Safe tea at home!
Raghuram Ekambaram
2 comments:
Raghu, well researched blog, only one thing I want to add until the Indian drivers develop common sense no amount of safety measures and policing will help.
Thanks balu ... but how do I say "common sense" in a piece that may find its way into a conference souvenir? This is why I stopped with education.
RE
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