Better driving habits can reduce road casualties

ON SATURDAY, a pile-up on the expressway linking Shanghai and neighboring Jiangsu province in East China killed three people and injured over 20. That could have been avoided had bad driving habits not been so common, said an editorial on thepaper.cn on Sunday:

What happened on Saturday is only one of the many road accidents that happen each year.

Many say the chief cause is the fast rise in car ownership in China. That's not true. In neighboring Japan, the number of automobiles reached 48 million as early as 2012, or 0.93 for every family; in China, even in 2015 there were 124 million registered cars, or 0.31 for every family.