True, but you really have to consider this is India… there are a lot of factors at play when it comes to accidents, including inequity and the “value of lives”. I read the other day that some 50 or so people die everyday, as a mundane routine, in the Indian railway system… people falling off of overcrowded trains, people run over by trains as they hurry across the track, so on.
>> At any rate, I posted the video as a comment on Michael calling Carrol’s reference a myth (or some such word, I forget which). There is a particular logic and order to the way the traffic moves, which to an unfamiliar person might look scary, but how much generalisation that affords is questionable.
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> I know what you mean. But I live in Los Angeles and here people curse other drivers in many languages when they don't follow the rules.
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:-)
> If you look at some of the stuff I posted earlier, there is something close to consensus that the solution to traffic problems anywhere is developing "rules of the road.”
You are referring to the links? I started reading them and plan to finish soon (hopefully!). The first one was written by some researchers at IIT. IIT is the most premier educational institution in India, arguably the most elite in the world (acceptance rates to IIT would make Harvard a cake walk :-)). Do you think it is possible that the prescription (“rules of the road”) reflects the bourgeois meritocratic bent of the authors? i.e., “if only these poor people would walk an extra 5 kms to use an underpass, where if they are girls they may be harassed by men, I wouldn’t need to keep hitting them” i.e., there is more than one way to skin that data?
I exaggerate, no doubt: when I once stayed overnight at a friend’s house in the outskirts of the city, all of us slept up on the roof because that’s the coolest part in the night. That night, over 2-3 hours I would hear a distant thudding noise. Upon inquiry, my friend clarified that that was likely the sound of drunk truckers going off the road! Drunk truckers are hardly bourgeois, and when they are not going off the road harming themselves, they also at times crash into others.
—ravi