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Comment by po | Hacker News Reader

It's worse than that, the incentives are such that it's better to kill than maim: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2... (although this is apparently in question: http://www.snopes.com/chinese-drivers-kill-pedestrians/)

This is one of those subjects where people like to put moral consequences on the bystanders when it's the rules and larger structures of the society that matter.

Driving in India is completely insane and after about a week of white-knuckle driving you kind of just go with the flow and convince yourself that it must just work. While that is true the definition of it 'working' is totally unexpected for a westerner. Driving conditions are extremely adversarial and accidents are frequent. People are injured and die all the time. It's the kind of problem that absolutely needs to be solved at the regulatory/policy level.

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My brother and sister-in-law were being driven to the airport to come home (to Cupertino) by his Father-in-law, at 2 in the morning. He drove at high speed, ignoring traffic lights and signs. They were alarmed; he was unconcerned. "Nobody is about this time in the night; we're perfectly safe!" So there's some kind of mass insanity going on in India for sure.

This is the kind of low-effort, off-the-cuff pronouncement that I hate seeing on here. Because an Indian (presumably) you knew was driving in an unsafe manner, you can directly make pronouncements about "mass insanity" about a country of a billion people?

Mind you, I'm not saying Indians are safe drivers. Indian driving, I freely admit, is spectacularly unsafe and makes me worried. There are a host of factors that cause this unsafe driving, including:

- Roads built for way smaller cars

- The sudden liberalization of the economy in the 90s leading to way more vehicles than the roads were designed for

- A lot of people owning a vehicle, and having social expectations from them about automatically knowing how to drive (I'm not kidding, and we're talking stick shift here)

- Traffic policemen numbers from the middle of the last century

- Mushrooming urbanization and the resultant low level of trust among urban populations

...but "some kind of mass insanity is going on in India because my brother's Indian father-in-law ran a bunch of red lights at 2am" is ridiculous.

Sorry to hit your hot button! That was meant kindly. But I see your point. And thanks for fleshing out the argument - certainly there is something desperately wrong with the Indian road situation.

Frankly, it is not just India, but, well, most of the hemisphere. Traffic is nuts, and drivers are nuts across most of the area (China, India, SE Asia, Russia), except for maybe Japan.

Its not a race thing, but maybe it is a culture thing. We certainly have our share of asshole drivers in the USA, but it doesn't at all compare to what I've seen elsewhere, in terms of quantity / quality.

In Mexico cities(Mazatlan & Pueto Penasco) a red light only means 'avoid collision with cross traffic' with no obligation to stop or slow if you don't have to.

> Sorry to hit your hot button! That was meant kindly.

The apology is meaningless; this has nothing to do with buttons. I merely pointed out a generalization based on an random anecdote, based on no real experience of the situation. Acknowledging it as such would help.

My father does that, and worse, here in the States. I worry about his welfare and will no longer ride in a car if he's driving.

This used to happen to me every time I had to go to the airport in the night, and would book some local taxi to do that. The drivers just never cared about the traffic signals in the night.

The prevalent attitude seems to be that traffic rules are more like guidelines and can be broken if it seems "okay" to do so. Driving on the wrong side of the road is for example quite common, and most people do it to avoid making a long U-turn. Someone who I knew was driving a car and had a head on collision with a scooter travelling the wrong way on a highway, and the scooter had three passengers on board it (it's called "tripling" and is also pretty common). Sometimes you get to see cars reversing on highways with fast moving traffic, because they missed a turn and wanted to go back.

Things could probably get better in the future though. In New Delhi, for example - according to a new law, if you are caught in a traffic violation (such as ignoring a traffic signal), you lose your license along with the right to drive for three months. I saw somebody's status on Facebook that this happened to them, so it's not just an empty threat too.

When I was in Vietnam & Indonesia, I regularly saw people driving on the wrong side of the road. Luckily, they would generally drive just off the road, so traffic on the road wouldn't be at risk of a collision. It was also similarly common to see entire families riding on one scooter - I regularly saw families of 4 riding together.

If you're "driving" (a scooter?) just off the road, or walking alongside a road, it is better to doit counter-traffic so you can see the traffic comming.

If you switch sides, the traffic will aproach from your back, and that's a lot more dangerous.

Driving in India is only insane to westerners. I have been driving in India for a decade and I dont find it hard at all. Driving in the US though is one of the most stressfull things for me.

Part of the stress in US is because of the different side driving, but also a lot because I have to keep in mind a TON of rules - lane markers, speed limits, lane changing etc.- and everyone moves in super high speed so any mistake can be fatal.

In India, on the other hand I just need to take care of the signals and otherwise wherever my car can fit, I am good to go. If my car rubs a bit against another car or a small bump here and there - no big deal. Driving in the night though is stressful in India also and I avoid it.

I drove in India for 6 years and have been driving in the US for 8 years now. I used to feel exactly the same way initially. I used to wonder how I would follow so many rules. But once I got used to them (in a few months) driving became SO easy. The traffic situation in India is objectively insane, without a doubt.

> Driving in India is only insane to westerners.

According to Wikipedia[1], there are 56% more traffic fatalities annually than in the US. Compared to the UK, it's 472% more. I don't think it's merely a matter of perspective. The data indicates it's much more dangerous in absolute terms.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

Those figures dont necessarily mean that driving in India is stressfull.

To give you one data point - almost ALL cars in the US/UK will have Air Bags. My guess is that MOST cars in India do NOT have an air bag. Additionally, this figure also included two wheelers, which will obviously have a higher fatality rate.

India might be having a lot less accidents than the US (and possibly because of low speeds), but just because most vehicles do not have air bag, the fatality rate could be much higher.

In any case, I am not really arguing that India traffic should not improve. Just that the perceived 'stress' level might be just because of a relative comparison against a different 'system' of traffic.

The whole article is full of interviews with Indians who are all complaining about how extremely dangerous it is to drive in India.

I just spent a month in India, and the driving is COMPLETELY INSANE. Saying it's only insane to Westerners, is the same as saying it's only not insane to South East Asians. If you're not tied up in absolutely hellish gridlock for an hour and a half to go ten miles. You're flying down "highways", playing constant chicken with every single oncoming vehicle. There is no argument that complete anarchy on the road ways is less stressful than actual civilized structure. It's not even worth going out at night further than you can walk, because by the time you got there, the night would be over. Red light? Bah, I'll go through it. Car there? I'll run into it. People walking? Ahhh they'll move. Wasting hours of your life to drive across town everyday? Pfft, who needs a life. Want a car with a seat belt? GOOD LUCK.

Nothing about any of that says stress free. Even if the traffic was perfect, the streets lined with absolute filth is enough to stress anyone out.

Everything that you mentioned isn't hard for me at all. The hellish gridlock - I rarely venture out on the main arteries during peak time. The playing chicken - I do it almost instinctively and dont even think about it.

The anarchy that you talk about is simply a result of diverse driving platforms sharing the same space. Indian roads need to have a wide variety of vehicles (2/3/4 wheelers) because 95% of the country simply cannot afford the cheapest car that sells in the US. We can't have wide roads with speed limits because its just too expensive and India is a dramatically poor country.

This model works for now and hopefully India will skip the insanely high energy American model on the way to the next.

Just because you're used to it, doesn't mean it's not completely insane and stressful for the rest of the world. You take two people who have never driven car before in their life, and throw one in a western driving scenario, and another in India. You tell me which one would be more stressed out.

> because I have to keep in mind a TON of rules - lane markers, speed limits, lane changing etc.- and everyone moves in super high speed so any mistake can be fatal.

You're really not going to like driving in Germany, then.

Seriously though - the Germans are amazingly good drivers (easily the best in the world), and it's mostly because their training is so thorough. This results in their having a common driving culture, so that going 300 km/hr on their remaining unrestricted/uncongested Autobahn is quite safe.

But would they be able to handle Indian traffic?

That is murder. Incentives explain the logical reason why a person is murdered rather than maimed, but it doesn't explain why the chinese person has the ethical framework of a psychopath.

In america, if you injure a victim in a car accident and no one is around, you still have the option of killing the victim and driving away to avoid getting caught. The inventive is the same, you avoid insurance increases and hospital bills. Yet this rarely happens in America!

In America the killing the person avoids a couple hundred dollar insurance increase, while putting you at risk of going to jail for a long time, and the legal system strongly enforces things. Now suppose that you had to pay the victim's hospital fees out of pocket, like people in China. At $10k/day (which I believe is standard hospital costs), that could quickly ruin you financially. If you thought there was a good chance that you could bribe the judge or use your connections to get out of it, it changes the calculation.

You could probably substitute "America" in your argument with "Germany in 1920," yet the German population killed millions of people. Is the problem the people, or the system that enables the evil that all of us are capable of?

Somebody did die while we were reading this article. According to the article "Fifteen people are killed every hour in road accidents in India".

Statistics always presents a wrong picture when considered in isolation.

Just for the sake of curiosity let us compare statistics of road accidents between USA and India. I'm taking the 2005 US road accident data as a reference: http://www.foxnews.com/story/2005/02/03/car-crashes-kill-400...

So according to the statistics from the above article, approximately 40,000 die every year in USA with 100 people dying every day due to road accidents. That is approximately 5 per hour. In India it is 100,000 per year. The population of USA is 318.9 million compared to 1.252 billion of India. If you put it in perspective, 0.013% of total population die every year due to road accidents in the US while only 0.00798% of total population die every year due to road accidents in India. So by looking at these calculations India "seems" to be a lot safer than the US (in-spite of horrible traffic rules and no proper emergency services). The issue is not the stats but proper implementation of emergency services which might help in saving a fraction of the total lives lost. But the real issue is regulating traffic (which is more erratic in the cities than in towns/villages in India).

Probably worth looking at the number of drivers/owned automobiles in each country to get even more refined.

As rfrey says, the number of vehicles is also an interesting stat. Adjusting for the number of vehicles, the death rate in the US is ~1/10 that of India.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

That's using a lower number of deaths for the US (but it really is closer to 35,000 in recent years) and a larger number for deaths in India than you did.

I suspect that you're making a bit of a mistake yourself in your calculations here if we want to get an understanding of if it's "more accidents" or "access to help when the accident happens" that is more important.

The reason is that you're taking the population of the USA where over 80% have licenses to drive (http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/pubs/hf/pl11028/ch...) and comparing with a country where most people don't own cars:

While nearly a third of people living in metros own personal transport, only 15 percent of the rural population own their own vehicle.

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/catalyst/driving-indias-...

I think you would really want to compare serious accidents per vehicle mile driven to compare effectiveness of policy and driving behavior across countries.

No I'm not making a mistake. I know very well that my calculations are skewed. That is precisely the point I was trying to make: Taking a statistic in isolation presents a wrong picture (that is also the reason I said: 'So by looking at these calculations India "seems" to be a lot safer than the US'. Note the stress on "seems")

Hope this clarifies my intent :)

[deleted]

http://www.snopes.com/chinese-drivers-kill-pedestrians/

In a country of 1 billion+ people you'll always get these stories.

Since as we know, we get in them in the west as well, the media will drum up, child left to die by road.

When we all know the drivers just didn't seem them or didn't know what happened. But that's a crappy story.

People help people in obvious severe immediate need and take risks doing it. It's human nature.

They get bystanders effect and sometimes they won't know they are in severe immediate need (A sleeping homeless person vs someone unconscious) but they don't ignore them because they will be sued.

Blaming people because of bystanders effect is poor form.

Your comment would be much nicer without that first sentence.

Didn't know it was in question, added a link to snopes.

> Blaming people because of bystanders effect is poor form.

My point, perhaps poorly made, was also that the larger societal incentives are to blame. Many people respond as we would hope. In the aggregate, people tend to respond to the pressures applied to them.

Driving in India is kind of insane. You need some skill to navigate the roads without hitting anyone. Need to watch all around. But in cities traffic moves very slowly so you can manage it.

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