Roads kill: The toll of traffic accidents is rising in poor countries

[cpzilliacus]

Washington Post: Roads kill: The toll of traffic accidents is rising in poor countries

It has a global death toll of 1.24 million per year and is on course to triple to 3.6 million per year by 2030.

In the developing world, it will become the fifth leading cause of death, leapfrogging past HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis and other familiar killers, according to the most recent Global Burden of Disease study.

The victims tend to be poor, young and male.

In one country – Indonesia – the toll is now nearly 120 dead per day; in Nigeria, it is claiming 140 lives each day.

This global killer is our most necessary accessory, the essential thing that gets us from here to there: the motorized vehicle.

Poor countries account for 50 percent of the world's road traffic but 90 percent of the traffic fatalities. The costs associated with these deaths are a "poverty-inducing problem,"  according to Jose Luis Irigoyen, a traffic safety specialist at the World Bank. "It's costing on average between 1 and 3 percent of GDP"  in low- and middle-income countries, he said, an amount that can offset the billions of dollars in aid money that these countries currently receive.

[Chris]

People often don't take highway safety serious in developing countries. It's common to see pedestrians on dual carriageways or freeways in Africa and Asia. People drive unbuckled. Minivans are overloaded and frequently involved in head-on accidents, resulting in high fatality counts per accident. Intoxicated driving is a major factor in eastern Europe. In countries like India, Pakistan or Bangladesh, the highway systems don't grow as fast as motorized traffic. While bypasses may be built around cities, traffic inside those cities is nothing but chaos.

[Tom958]

Fall sick with the healing: The 'killer' history of Karachi's first flyover

tl;dr: Karachi builds a lot of flyovers. The first was the result of meticulous research, careful planning and expert engineering, and building it resulted in a huge reduction in accidents at the city's deadliest intersection. Subsequent ones were built with less and less consideration and at a faster pace, and eventually they were lined up to create 'signal-free corridors." After the fact, it was discovered that rendering corridors signal free doubled the fatality rates there.