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https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-06/what-drove-japan-s-remarkable-traffic-safety-turnaround>
"In mid-August, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced
that the surge in American traffic deaths is continuing: An estimated 9,560
people died on US roadways in the first quarter of 2022, 7% more than a year
ago and the highest first quarter total in two decades.
The traffic safety slide is a trend that precedes Covid-19, but the disruptions
of the pandemic seemed to exacerbate the issue in the US, a phenomenon that
observers like New York Times’ David Leonhardt have attributed to mental health
issues and smartphone use: “Many Americans have felt frustrated or unhappy, and
it seems to have affected their driving,” he wrote recently, adding in a tweet
that “traffic deaths began to rise around 2015…around the same time that
smartphones became ubiquitous.”
If stress and cell phones are causing this crisis, it’s curious why so many
other countries have avoided it. Almost all developed nations have seen a
decline in roadway deaths over the last decade, while the US has endured a 30%
rise. As I wrote recently in CityLab, an American is now about 2.5 times as
likely as a Canadian to die in a crash and three times as likely as a French
citizen.
The contrast is even starker with Japan, a country known for its innovative
approach to transportation (where else can you watch a baseball manager enter a
stadium on a hovercraft?). Fewer than 3,000 people died in Japanese crashes in
2021, compared to almost 43,000 in the United States. On a per capita basis,
Japan had just 2.24 deaths per 100,000 residents, less than a fifth the US rate
of 12.7 per 100,000.
And Japanese roads are getting even safer: 2021 saw the fewest road fatalities
of any year since record-keeping began in 1948. It’s quite a change from the
1960s, when a booming economy and millions of inexperienced drivers contributed
to annual fatality figures six times higher than they are today. So dangerous
were the nation’s streets that Japanese observers called the phenomenon the
“Traffic War,” noting that annual roadway deaths exceeded those from the First
Sino-Japanese War in 1894-5.
Japan is now a traffic safety success story — especially when compared to the
US. Here are a few lessons from the island nation that could resonate outside
its borders."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
