The terrific strains caused by a rising car culture in emerging economies

NYT story on rising traffic fatalities in India, where, like China, the car culture explodes.

It is a little-known truth that when you travel in the Gap or in New Core pillars even, the biggest danger you face is not illness or bad water-food or terrorism.  The most likely route to death is a car accident.

This totally corresponds to all the travel I've done in my life (almost forty countries in all, about 2/3rds New Core/Gap): the illnesses and the security stuff were nothing to the routine dangers of automobile travel.

And yeah, I think of that as we contemplate our travels around Ethiopia in coming weeks (thanks for that third donated otoscope, though!).

But India's got it bad:

India overtook China to top the world in road fatalities in 2006 and has continued to pull steadily ahead, despite a heavily agrarian population, fewer people than China and far fewer cars than many Western countries.

See, the Chinese can't be #1 in everything!

But it's not just a size-matters argument, because a lot of New Core/emerging economies are seeing car fatalities level off or even decline as they upgrade fleets and roads and technology, but not India:

While road deaths in many other big emerging markets have declined or stabilized in recent years, even as vehicle sales jumped, in India, fatalities are skyrocketing — up 40 percent in five years to more than 118,000 in 2008, the last figure available.

The World Health Org says India's government is slow to wake up to the issue, but even hearing that is kind of amazing to me:  the notion that rising India needs to focus more government attention on such prosaic things when, of course, it could be waging resource wars across the planet, right?

Ah, the details of globalization's advance.

Certain biases don't help:  new car drivers seems to despise motorcyclists, pedestrians, etc. (not exactly an Asia-specific bias, I might add); helmet laws for motorcyclists are only for men, as women are apparently expendable; etc.  But if you've spent any time being driven or driving in places like China and India, you're probably like me and have to squint a lot so as to not flinch constantly at all the close calls with those not wearing wrap-around steel. 

So as the BRIC continue to balloon their domestic car fleets, expect these tensions to rise, triggering greater government responses.

The world stands at the bottom of a very steep curve.  About a century to get the first billion cars; maybe 1/4 that to get the second!

Comments

[Dan Hare]

It was in the late 60's that the emergence of paramedics and pre-hospital emergency care started in America. It went from an adage of 'load and go', to the sophistication it has today.

My late father was an early champion of that market as he built a company that supplied that industry from splints, cots, EMS kits, stretchers, training manikins, etc.

That might be a good biz op for the emerging markets.