Authors: Tom Vanderbilt
Must this be so? Must history be a guide, must it preordain the future? Must that many people die on the roads? When one compares the rankings of per capita GDP and the traffic fatality rate, they gloomily do seem to correspond. Norway, for example, ranked as having the world’s third-highest GDP in 2005 by the International Monetary Fund, was among the world’s top three countries that year in terms of traffic safety. Uganda, on the other hand, ranked 154th in the world in terms of GDP, has one of the world’s highest traffic fatality rates, some 160 deaths per 10,000 vehicles (a rate that will presumably rise, up to a point, as its GDP rises). The reasons are not hard to understand: lower-quality roads and infrastructure, fewer hospitals and doctors, less-safe vehicles. In Nigeria, where the buses are nicknamed “moving morgues” and “flying coffins,” the situation was summed up by one commuter: “Many of us know most of the buses are death traps but since we can’t afford the expensive taxi fares, we have no choice but to use the buses.”
Sometimes, however, countries that have very similar levels of GDP can have varying levels of traffic risk. One of the most striking cases of this involves Belgium and the Netherlands. They are virtually identical in per capita GDP, but in Belgium, the traffic fatality rate is more than twice as high as the Netherlands (even though life expectancy itself is slightly higher in Belgium). These two countries share a border, even a language—why should Belgium be so much more dangerous? Perhaps it has to do with population density. Studies have shown that the less densely populated a place, the higher the risk of traffic fatalities. And, it turns out, the Netherlands crams more people into less space, while the Belgians have more room to roam. The
nonfatal
crash rate, on the other hand, is usually higher in more densely populated places: There are more people to run into. In Belgium that rate, too, was nearly twice as high as in the Netherlands. What about motorization levels? The higher the level of motorization, the more the fatality risk tends to drop—but where the Netherlands had only 422 vehicles per thousand people in 1999, Belgium had 522. Traffic laws might seem a good explanation, except that both Belgium and the Netherlands have similar speed limits and blood alcohol concentration restrictions.
So why is Belgium a more dangerous place to drive? An answer of sorts may be found in another kind of index, one that more or less aligns with the GDP but often diverges in interesting ways: corruption. According to indices compiled by the anticorruption watchdog Transparency International, the Netherlands was ranked number nine in 2006, while Belgium appeared much farther down the list, at number twenty.
What does this have to do with traffic? Most people tend to think of corruption by the standard definition of the use of public office for private gain. Working out from that, however, we might consider corruption as being indicative of a larger lack of faith in the law. In his book
Why People Obey the Law,
the legal scholar Tom Tyler posits that people generally comply with laws less because they are deterred by the penalties of not doing so, or because they have calculated it’s in their best self-interest, and more because they think it’s the right thing to do. Yet they are more likely to think it is the right thing, argues Tyler, if they perceive that the legal authorities are legitimate. People who go to traffic court, Tyler found, are less concerned with the outcome—even when it is a costly ticket or fine—than with the fairness of the process. When there is less respect for the law, there is a lesser cost (or greater gain) for not following it. Less effective governance means that laws are less effective, which means that people are less likely to follow them.
In Belgium, it may be no coincidence that the country both ranks comparatively poorer on the corruption index and has a public that seems less interested in following traffic laws. Lode Vereeck, a Belgian economist at Hasselt University, has noted that in survey after survey of people’s attitudes toward traffic regulations, Belgians seem resistant; they’re more hostile than their neighbors to things like seat-belt laws, lower speed limits, and drunk-driving laws (and also more likely to drink before driving, if surveys can be believed). At the same time, according to Vereeck, the number of violations recorded by Belgian police dropped from 1993 to 1999—even though Belgium’s roads clearly did not get safer. A driver was also less likely to get a traffic fine in Belgium than in its neighbor to the north: The Netherlands, with roughly 50 percent more people (and a lower motorization rate), issued nearly
eight
times the number of tickets in 2000.
While the laws in Belgium and the Netherlands may be similar, it seems there is a different attitude to following and enforcing those laws. Some researchers have argued that Belgium’s system of yielding at unmarked intersections, known as
priorité de droite,
or “yield to the right,” is the real reason for Belgium’s extraordinary fatality rates. But most of these intersections are in urban areas, which typically see nonfatal crashes. In any case, the
priorité de droite
itself simply speaks to the larger issue: a resistance against regulation (in the form of stop signs or traffic lights) and a lack of interest in following the existing rules. As the examples in Chapter 7 pointed out, traffic can be made to move well and safely with no signs at all,
if
strong enough social norms are in place.
The nations that rank as the least corrupt—such countries as Finland, Norway, New Zealand, Sweden, and Singapore—are also the safest places in the world to drive. Sweden, of course, practically oozes safety, from its flagship Volvos to its “Vision Zero” policy, which seeks the eventual elimination of all traffic fatalities (it passed this even after it already had the world’s lowest traffic fatality rate). The British traffic psychologist Ian Walker tells the story about how a group of researchers equipped a car with cameras and got a group of Swedish military conscripts to drive around for a while. The purpose was to see how having passengers would affect a recruit’s driving. “They thought, Put four young guys in a car and give them free rein—they’ll go nuts,” Walker says. “Actually, the guys were saying, ‘Careful, slow down.’”
In Finland, which has one of the lowest crash rates in the world, drivers are given fines based on a complicated calculus primarily involving their after-tax income. The law, intended to counter the regressive nature of speeding tickets (they take up a larger part of a poor person’s income than a rich person’s), has led to some very high-profile speeding tickets, such as Internet entrepreneur Jaakko Rytsölä’s $71,400 tab for going 43 miles per hour in a 25-mile-per-hour zone. There has been some grumbling, especially among the wealthy, but the law remains popular; in 2001, the legislature overwhelmingly rejected a cap on fines. Women seem to find the fine more fair than men (this is interesting for several reasons, which I will return to shortly). But what’s remarkable about sliding-scale speeding tickets is not necessarily whether they get people to slow down. It’s that in Finland legislators have the confidence to pass laws that unilaterally impose high costs on breaking the law, that traffic police will actually issue the fines rather than accept what in theory could be a huge bribe, and that the public, by and large, feels all this is fair.
It’s true that Norway and Sweden are among the wealthiest countries in the world and, having taken care of the basic needs of their societies (e.g., getting everyone food and running water, establishing political stability), they can move on to things like safer roads. But as the case of Belgium shows, GDP itself is not necessarily a predictor for the safeness of the roads. France, traditionally one of the more dangerous countries in Europe to drive in, lowered the number of people killed on its roads from 7,721 in 2001 to just under 5,000 in 2005. It is not as if the French GDP soared during this period; in fact, it was rather stagnant.
What France did was buy Breathalyzers and automated speed cameras by the thousands and overhaul its points system for violations. It brought accountability to a system that had been plagued by chronic traffic ticket “fixing.” (One study found that a third of the male employees at a national utility company had had tickets fixed and that those who had were also more likely to have been in a crash). Ticket fixing is so endemic in France that starting in 1958, incoming presidents declared amnesty on a range of traffic violations, from minor to fairly serious—a rather self-defeating measure that itself has been blamed for hundreds of traffic fatalities. The traffic-ticket holiday was curtailed by Jacques Chirac and seems to be on its way out altogether. France, in at least one way, is becoming less corrupt (indeed, it did drop a few places on the index during those same years).
The lesson is that wealth seems to affect traffic fatalities but corruption may affect them even more. It could just be that lifting GDP lowers corruption
and
traffic fatalities. But a study by a group of U.S. economists concluded that the statistical relationship between corruption (as measured by the International Country Risk Guide) and traffic fatalities was actually stronger than the link between income and traffic fatalities. What they were saying, essentially, is that money is not enough. Even when countries become wealthy enough to start shifting attention to things like traffic safety, one still needs credible laws and credible people to enforce the laws. New Zealand, which is one of the five least corrupt countries in the world, is below countries like Austria and Spain in GDP but has safer roads, as measured by fatalities per 10,000 vehicles. Russia, on the other hand, is ranked as more corrupt than other countries at similar development levels, and its roads reflect that fact: Moscow is filled with notoriously corrupt traffic cops and cars blazing through traffic jams with ersatz blue sirens. Russia itself reportedly accounts for two-thirds of Europe’s road fatalities.
The complex question of why poorer countries seem to suffer from more corruption and whether that corruption is a bad thing in itself has long been debated among economists and social scientists. Some argue that “efficient corruption” is a useful and necessary cost of rapid economic development, that bribes and rule skirting can be used to outwit creaky centralized bureaucracies. Others counter that corrupt politicians are not necessarily faster politicians, in terms of hustling development projects through, and may actually slow things down to get even more money. Corruption is a brake on development, they say. Countries like China, which are booming
and
have relatively widespread corruption, could be developing even faster if corruption were tamed, they contend. The first group argues that a system in which firms have to pay kickbacks to corrupt government officials means that the firm with the most “efficient” bid will also be able to afford the highest bribe, while the second group maintains that this system rewards inefficient firms. Daniel Kaufmann, an economist with the World Bank and a leading critic of corruption, uses the example of a firm that was disqualified because its bid was beneath the acceptable “minimum.”
With traffic, it’s arguably corruption that gets in the way of economic growth, not the other way around. While no economist would view a traffic jam as an efficient use of resources, traffic congestion can symbolize the economic vitality of a country (simply because miles driven usually increase in stronger economic times). “Bad” traffic can be seen as just an outcome of that success. But corruption itself can cause traffic problems, the sort that represent a drain on economic growth, not an outcome. Take, for example, the myriad roadblocks that are a daily fact of life in many developing countries. The process typically has little to do with vehicle inspection or safety and a lot to do with police or soldiers trying to extract something “for the boys.” Corruption does not speed a driver’s way through some bureaucratic tangle; rather, the tangle is formed
because
of corruption.
In some places, these systems are so entrenched that they can take on the logic of an economic system, a kind of “corruption pricing” instead of “congestion pricing.” A study of the bribes that Indonesian truckers had to pay at military checkpoints showed that the closer the truckers got to their destination, the higher the bribe. (The officials also charged more for newer trucks and trucks carrying valuable cargo.) When the number of checkpoints dropped after the military scaled back its forces, the average bribe per checkpoint increased, leaving the researchers to conclude that fewer traffic officials may be better (although their absence may invite criminals to take their place).
As the economist Tim Harford observed after a visit to Cameroon (one of the world’s poorest and most corruption-plagued countries), corruption in traffic is tremendously unfair and inefficient. Protracted “inspections” and bartering over small amounts slows the flow of goods and people. The money goes into the pockets of underpaid officials, not to fixing roads or making them safer. Trip times and costs become wildly unpredictable. Robert Guest, Africa correspondent for the
Economist,
wrote of once accompanying the driver of a Guinness beer truck on a three-hundred-mile journey in Cameroon. The trip, which might have taken twenty hours elsewhere, took four days. The reason was in part the crumbling roads, but also the forty-seven checkpoints at which they were forced to stop for dubious safety inspections and petty bribes. Drivers suffer not only the hardship of bad roads but the privilege of paying to use them. The bribes paid and the ensuing delays get passed on to beer consumers in the form of higher prices. Guest’s suggestion: “Lift those roadblocks and put the police to work repairing potholes.”
Corruption begins at street level. The traffic cop is its foot soldier, the agent of bad traffic. He pulls over motorists for phantom violations, reducing not only traffic flow but the incentive for any driver to follow the law. Some argue that corrupt cops
increase
the incentive to follow the law because these cops are that much more on the lookout for excuses to issue a fine, but this presumes they are actually pulling people over for legitimate reasons. As one of the average person’s primary interfaces with the legal system, the traffic cop becomes a symbol of the legitimacy of the regime. And what about the traffic he’s directing? Corruption casts its shadow there as well.