india tops fatal road accidents

Everybody cannot own a Mercedess or BMW to have safety u have to see ur pocket before buying a car. If ur putting a ban on M800 & Omini then u have to ban all the other small car on the road in this way u will be wipeing off a whole small car from the road & page from the car magazines.

Everybody wants to ride with you in the Limo, but what you need it somebody who will take the bus with you when the Limo breaks down - Oprah Winfrey

In our country car users/buyers are paying very high level of taxes in form of customs,excise,vat,raod tax,etc.If the govt can reduce them & force car manufactuerers to add safety features to car it would save more lives on the road.

Dont forget Driving habits, here everyone wants to reach home at the earliest, you can feel you are driving at comfortable speed and all of sudden someone is trying to overtake from your left, somebody turned without using indicators, biker is driving fast and overtaking u from left.

Day before yesterday I was going to hospital around 7pm to see my younger sis with family in Fiesta. My wife, 2 newborn kids, my elder sis & her 2 kids were there in car with me and all of sudden i saw a dumper is coming at high speed and he was heading towards my car, extreme right and I thought he was not in control, I turned my car towards extreme left to avoid and luckily avoided a certain accident. Another point, koi left side may nahi tha. Everyone was scared in the car and somehow I managed to escape.

So, what I want to say if India tops fatal road accidents, main reason is Rash driving. yeah, with additional safety features in cars, death figures can decrease but what about Bikers? Passengers? one can a bit safe in car but someone is walking through or someone is on 2-wheeler ? Check out figures death figures of 2-wheeler drivers will be maximum I guess.

People dont change when you tell them that there is a Better option... They change when they realise that there is No Other Option..

IMHO before we talk about additional security features like air bag/ABS...etc. or  banning Maruti 800/Omni..etc. some basic things all the drivers-we- need to follow .

Use dimmer in a proper way - Nowadays only few people are using it
Utmost priority should be given to Pedestians
We should have self control,patience & a mind to follow the rules while driving
signal jumps should be avoided
Left side overtaking only in unavoidable conditions
Govt should ban Xenon lamps(Blue lights)  - Excessive usage of high volt bulbs, This is again linked to point 1.
VCD/DVD players should be fixed in drivers rear side(nowadays we can see lot of guys watching movie and driving )

Guys, Please share your thoughts on this and add more points what you feel to include

What about the idiots who cross the roads, especially highways (where there is no zebra crossing) thinking that its the drivers' responsibility to safeguard their lives?

What about the bikers who ride as if no other vihicle exists on the road? Its not rare to see one zoom and cross your path from the left. Does mere honking absolve them of all responsibility of biking sensibly?

S = k.I^2, where S is the amount of stupidity a species possesses, I is the intelligence the species has and k is the universal constant of stupidity.

Deepam, Millions of thanks to you for starting this thread

Rohit, Be cool man... I missed zebra crossing in my above post

Utmost priority should be given to Pedestians in zebra crossing. 

See I am not trying to justify pedestrians/Bikers.  I was pointing the bikers when I mentioned LS overtaking.

 

It's not that we (people) are not aware of the traffic rules & signals - most of us have the awareness but we behave irresponsibly. 

Traffic rules (or any for that matter) are basically a set of commonsenses framed.  The plight is not that we don't have the commonsense but that, that we don't use the sense so commonly.

Honesty is not a Spare Wheel that you pull out when in trouble. It's a Steering Wheel that keeps you on the right path throughout the life's journey.

Pankaj....i'd like to add on......"MOst"of US hav awareness........... it mite not b true........

i mean many of "US" nkno how easy it is to get a licence in India...leave alone a driving test...u dnt even hav to b present or infact alive ,to get a driving licence !!!........

n true...common sense is not used commonly......

I do not believe that any of these factors are the main reasons for fatal road accidents in India. In my opinion, the three main reasons are the horribly unsafe condition of our highways; the lax procedures at our RTOs before a driver's license is issued, resulting in a large number of poorly trained and unskilled drivers on our highways; lastly, the poorly maintained and unfit vehicles that are on our roads.

Just a week back, I drove to Surat from Mumbai and back. The route was NH-8, supposedly a national highway, part of the much-touted "Golden Quadrilateral" project. But it is a shockingly unsafe 4-lane highway. The dividers are poorly designed with many breaks for U-turns which are not very visible at night. Sure enough, we saw a Qualis that had gone right over a divider at one of those dangerous U-turn points, where if you make the fatal mistake of taking the right-most lane and miss the right-turn signal marked on this lane, you will run into the divider after the (often invisible) break.

I had two narrow escapes in this trip while returning from Surat to Mumbai at night. Firstly, the two-lane road abruptly became one-lane at one point. Just prior to this point, I was in the left lane, about to overtake a slow-moving lorry in the right lane. Suddenly my lane ended and I found myself on the edge of the road. I rapidly moved to the right lane behind the lorry, just in time to avoid hitting an invisible divider that showed up where the left lane was supposed to exist.

The second incident was downright scary. I was moving serenely in my Santro, about to overtake a dumper on the left lane. The dumper driver apparently sees a massive pothole in front of him and swerves violently to the right, straight into my path. My brother-in-law, sitting in the front passenger seat, screams "WATCH IT" and I react just as he completed the "IT", and swerve my Santro equally violently to the right of the dumper (no hope of braking at that point). Hats off to my Santro, it pullled off the swerve with nonchalant ease even though we were at about 90 kmph.

Is the Santro a "safe" car by your standards? Maybe not, but I maintain that it is one of the safest cars for our roads. It sure did save our lives on this night. A heavier car may be safer in the eventuality of a crash. But a heavy car will not swerve as easily as the light and agile Santro did, to avert the accident. My alloy wheels and tubeless tyrea at high pressure (35 psi) did their job too in this emergency, as did the Santro's outstanding power steering; the steering response was instant and there was no skidding, even though the car was fully loaded.

[ http://in.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=sradhakr1&p=r ] & [ http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0504115 ] & [ http://www.worldscinet.com/ijqi/08/0803/S021974991000640X.html ]

Briefly... getting a license in that fashion is an irrresponsible act on our part - and we are aware of it.  But we indulge into it because we have a corrupt mind - not withstanding the commonsense & awareness we otherwise have.

@Srinivasan, I agree that poor road & vehicle conditions, and the driving inabilities at large, attribute to fatal accidents but I would emphasis that in the given scenario it's in our own interest to be cautious - it's expected more from people like me & you

Just to add - I have driven quite a few times on NH-8 & must agree to you that some portions of it are below the standards of NHs.  Traffic too is heavy.  I suggest/request we should be cautious on such highways - especially if we are not very conversant with the NH & its traffic pattern. 

Honesty is not a Spare Wheel that you pull out when in trouble. It's a Steering Wheel that keeps you on the right path throughout the life's journey.