Showing posts tagged roadskill
After a couple of years of relative quiet, Thailand’s political turmoil resumed again a few months ago when the Red Shirts’ mortal foes, the Yellow Shirts, mounted protests that effectively prevented the government from functioning, and this time the army took over in a coup d’état. The resilience of groups like the motorcycle taxi drivers, however, is likely to make it difficult, and perhaps impossible, for the new junta to maintain undisputed control—or to turn the government over to any civilian party that the drivers and others like them view as deadly rivals.
Motorcycle taxis are a large and, more important, representative constituency. If you want to get someplace quickly in traffic-choked Bangkok, your best bet is to take a two-wheeled motorcycle taxi, even if it doesn’t feel entirely safe to weave through traffic the way they do, squeezing in the tight spaces between slowly moving cars. There are some 200,000 motorcycle taxi drivers in Bangkok, most of them licensed, some of them not, recognizable by the orange vests they wear as they infiltrate the traffic, or wait for customers under corrugated metal awnings. They make 4 to 6 million trips a day, which means that the motorcycle taxis carry ten times as many passengers as Bangkok’s smooth-as-silk rapid transit system.
These drivers are, in other words, indispensable for local transportation.
Read more from Pulitzer Center grantee Richard Bernstein’s project, Thailand: Is Democracy Doomed? http://bit.ly/thailandmotorcycle
Dodging potholes, hustlers, and the Taliban—how do you drive in a country going through a military withdrawal?
Read more of our #roadskill reporting by Pulitzer Center grantee Jeffrey Stern.
Dodging potholes, hustlers, and the Taliban—how do you drive in a country going through a military withdrawal?
Read more of our #roadskill reporting by Pulitzer Center grantee Jeffrey Stern.
ROADS KILL: Nigeria: Ignoring the Rules of the Road in Abuja
NIGERIA
ABUJA — The green-and-white taxi sped through the intersection, ignoring the traffic policewoman officer and narrowly missing a red Honda Civic coming from the adjacent road.
“Wèr è!” — the word means “lunatic” in the Yoruba language — the policewoman screams at the offending driver as he steps on the gas and zooms away. She glares at the disappearing vehicle, powerless to do anything else — no ticket, no fine, nothing for Nigeria’s reckless drivers who routinely act as though the law does not apply to them.
It’s only 11:30 a.m. in Abuja, Nigeria’s busy capital, and this policewoman is about to witness several more infractions.
In Nigeria, speed limits appear to be viewed as mere suggestions, lanes are flexible, driving against traffic is routine and if you are caught, a little money can make all your troubles go away.
Nigeria has the worst driving record in Africa: nearly 34 deaths for every 100,000 residents, according to a 2013 World Health Organization report. The Federal Road Safety Commission, the agency responsible for road safety administration in the country, blames most of these accidents on speeding. The country’s notoriously poorly maintained roads, riddled with potholes, help ensure that Nigeria is among the most dangerous places in the world to drive.
“It is not just about drivers here not regarding the rules,” says Afolabi Bakare, a taxi driver. “The truth is most of them do not even know the rules. How many people go to driving school before they get their driving licenses? To tell the truth, even me — I did not know how to drive very well when I got my driver’s license.”
“All you need to do is go to the office and ‘settle’ someone with about [31 dollars], and they do the license for you,” he said. “You do not even have to be there for data capture. It’s the Nigerian thing.”
The federal government has endorsed various policies to deal with the menace of unqualified drivers and to rein in fake driver’s licenses, but authorities have consistently fallen short on enforcement. People seem to always find a way around the system.
— Ameto Akpe
This is Part II of four stories detailing traffic fatalities around the world. View all four stories published by The Washington Post and check out our interactive map.
ROADS KILL: Mali: I Hadn’t Been Expecting Sheep
Mali
BAMAKO — I’ve gotten used to watching the city’s scooters carry strange things as they weave between the cars and buses that clog the dusty, sun-baked streets.
I’ve seen a father driving with his daughter perched on the handlebars of his scooter while his wife clutched his waist, a sleeping baby strapped to her back. I’ve seen a teenage girl in a tank top drain a can of beer while she drove and then toss the empty container at a police officer. What I hadn’t seen, until recently, was a scooter with an upside-down sheep, legs bound by twine, stuffed awkwardly into a large box on the moped’s back rack. I did a double-take when the sheep baa-ed as it went by. My driver didn’t seem to notice.
Bamako is a city of scooters, for better and often for worse. The motorbikes are cheap, fast and staggeringly fuel-efficient.
The primary appeal of a scooter, though, is its small size. Bamako’s traffic is horrendous, and drivers can easily spend an hour or longer sitting uncomfortably in their cars as they slowly inch their way from one side of the city to the other. Scooters are different. Drivers — depending on their skill, bravery or stupidity — can try to maneuver the little bikes through the impossibly narrow gaps separating one honking car from another. When they succeed, Bamako’s scooter drivers slash their travel time significantly. When they fail, bad things happen.
“I was hit by a bus,” a businessman named Traore Sebou Tidiane said matter-of-factly. “I wasn’t going very fast, thankfully, so all I got were some cuts and a broken arm. I’ve seen worse.”
Many Malians have.
It easy to see why Mali’s roads are so dangerous, especially for scooter drivers. Malian drivers are incredibly patient and courteous — cars and buses routinely stop to allow other vehicles to cut in front of them — but accidents are inevitable when so many cars are jammed onto the same narrow roads, particularly ones that don’t have working traffic lights or street lights. Scooter drivers make things even riskier for themselves by rarely wearing helmets.
“I know I should wear one, but it’s just too hot,”Awa Traore said as she loaded an impressively large stack of groceries onto the back of her scooter.
— Yochi Dreazen
This is Part I of four stories detailing traffic fatalities around the world. View all four stories published by The Washington Post
and check out our interactive map.
Click the play button above to see our embedded interactive map.
As any fan of Russian dash-cam videoscan attest, the quality of driving in the country leaves much to be desired. It suffers from a fatality rate twice that of the U.S. and five times greater than many European nations. Southward in China, there is low enforcement of seat-belt and helmet usage but a strong (self-reported) intolerance for drunken driving. Still, with a huge number of cars on the road and often lax attitude toward traffic laws, the republicconsistently takestop score for the number of road deaths internationally.
In Southeast Asia, there’s good news and bad. The traffic in Indonesia has improved recently thanks to the government’s implementation of bus lanes, for instance. But in Vietnam, where scooters and motorcycles make up 95 percent of registered vehicles, there continues to be a major health risk in that few people wear adequate armor. More than 80 percent of helmets that bikers own fail to meet the lowest of safety standards, according to a survey.
The Atlantic Cities’ John Metcalfe dives into our Roads Kill map to examine road safety trends around the world. Keep reading here.
