“Novel” American strategy to reduce road fatality!
On a recent Delhi-Lucknow trip (1100 Km) via the Yamuna Expressway (and the Agra-Lucknow Expressway), I noticed the ongoing installation of guardrails on both sides of the median, perhaps on recommendation from the expert committee to reduce, if not eliminate, road fatality on this stretch. The speed limit on this 185 km stretch is 100 km for cars and 80 km for cargo carriers and passenger buses. Not a bad idea. Speed reduction is one of the best solutions to achieve the goal. Speed Thrills. But It Kills, blinks the electronic banner. We notice. Do we really?
During the same ride, my handset pinged, drawing my attention to a road safety news item that appeared in the Washington Post (3 February 2022). The US Secretary for Transport (equivalent to India’s Minister for Road Transport & Highways Nitin Gadkari) Pete Buttigieg was quoted asunder:
“People make mistakes, but human mistakes don’t always have to be lethal. In a well-designed system, safety measures make sure that human fallibility does not lead to human fatalities.” He responded after the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reported that traffic deaths increased 12% up to September 2021, which was considered the greatest percent jump in year-on-year fatalities for the first nine months since 1975.
The hope that the lockdown on account of the pandemic would bring down traffic on roads turned out to be ill-founded. Instead of staying home, drivers’ speeding and reckless behavior resulted in this unwarranted jump in road fatalities.
Is there something new being contemplated to tame this menace? Yes. According to the report, the focus is on a “safe system approach.” What’s that? Limit the harm they cause, simply put. How? By designing roads that encourage them to go more slowly. Wow! Slow and steady wins the race! Here, we know what race is.
Almost 50 years ago, John Muir wrote How To Keep Your Volkswagen Alive (1969). Talking about new safety equipment such as “safety belts” (yes, it was a novelty even for the Europeans then!), he commented: “If we all constantly drive as we are strapped to the front of the car like Aztec sacrifices so we’d be the first thing hit, there would be a lot fewer accidents.” His suggestion did not receive the requisite attention then. He was not the loser.
Matthew Crawford, a globally renowned thinker, writes in his book The World Beyond Your Head: How To Flourish in an Age of Distraction (published in 2015) that traffic engineers discovered that our approach to driving is influenced quite by the features of a road.
He quotes Eric Dumvaugh, a civil and environmental engineer at Texas A&M University, saying that it is assumed that safety is the result of “forgiving roads.” “We figure straightening out streets and widening shoulders makes a road safety. When roads look dangerous, people slow down and become more heedful. It is pointed out that “a few iconoclasts have begun making roads more hazardous — narrowing them, reducing visibility, and removing curbs, center lines, guardrails, and even traffic signs and signals. These roads, research shows, are home to significantly fewer crashes and traffic fatalities.”
I noticed several tire burst vehicles on the Agra-Lucknow Expressway stretch (300 km +). Catching up with a driver at the midway cafeteria, I heard him say: that the “excellent road (6 lanes) at times makes me wonder whether my car is moving or not. It appears static. You go into a different zone”.
Is he talking about “highway hypnotism,” a perfect research material? I agree. I experienced highway hypnotism more than a decade ago while riding in a car from Muscat to Salalah (1000 km), which put my colleague driving Toyota Echo into a momentary sleep session, and we almost died when our car jumped divider. Lucky, we survived, thanks to no traffic in the opposite direction.
Here’s the link for the Salalah story: https://gulfdiary.blogspot.com/2007/10/deathly-encounter-salalah.html
