A highway in Urumqi. Seven people killed in two accidents at the same spot.

If this fails to alarm you, just consider how these tragedies took place. Medics and traffic policemen were tending to victims of an accident, two of whom were already dead. There were scores of onlookers, many of them lending a helping hand to the relief operation. In came a speeding truck, knocking down and killing three medics and two policemen and injuring dozens.

This disaster in the capital of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region is just one example of how more than 300 people die every day on China's roads.

China leads the world in terms of road deaths, with this figure rising annually by 10 per cent.

A study conducted by Jinan University Medical School in Guangzhou shows that 6,000 road accidents took place in China in 1951. Fifty years later, the figure had skyrocketed to 750,000. About 20,000 more accidents were added to that figure last year, with more than 110,000 people losing their lives and five times that number being injured.

That's a lot of people even in a country of 1.3 billion. And the estimated direct economic loss of more than 3.3 billion yuan (US$397 million) is again an astronomical amount by any standard.

World Health Organization statistics show that more than 1.2 million people are killed in traffic accidents across the world every year, with many more injured and permanently disabled. But more worrying are statistics showing that traffic accidents will become the third-biggest cause of death by 2020, up from the present ninth. Not surprisingly, most of these deaths will continue to occur in developing countries such as China.

How bloodstained will China's roads be in 14 years' time if we don't start taking drastic measures to tackle this menace? Any further delay will result in more needless deaths and losses to the economy, especially because the death toll and death rate per 10,000 automobiles in China is already almost eight times that in the United States.

There have been arguments to the contrary, however. Many observers feel the number of road casualties is higher in China because it has more people than any other country. These observers say that if the death rate is calculated on the basis of percentage, then South Korea would lead the world in road accidents and fatalities.

That may be true, but the fact remains that China accounts for more than 15 per cent of the world's road accidents even though it has just over 4 per cent of its vehicles. It indeed is very difficult to argue that point, especially when drivers were responsible for 92.7 per cent of road accidents and 92.2 per cent of road deaths last year.

Worse still is the fact that many of those deaths were caused by drunk drivers, who shouldn't have been behind the wheel in the first place. But where do these intoxicated killers get the courage to drive? Lack of proper punishment is perhaps to blame for that. We need laws that deal strictly with such offenders. But even more than that, we should ensure that driving licences are issued only to people who know about road safety and respect human life.

This is all the more important because more than half the people we lose to road accidents are between 16 and 45, the prime working age for a booming economy like China's. Also, it will save many families from ruination because most of these victims are poor people, and at times the only breadwinners for their families.

Email: zouhr@chinadaily.com.hk

(China Daily 06/30/2006 page4)