Look beyond driver error to safer design and speed limits

Manas Fuloria

I bet that you, dear reader, have probably lost a friend or relative to road crashes. I have lost one mausaji and one dear friend. Near-misses cut even closer. My father had his face gashed in a crash, my mother-in-law had her knee broken in another. I myself survived two close calls.

You may have too. The police put down most crashes to “driver error”. That’s incorrect and dangerous, since it absolves others. Here are four things that the government must do, and a fifth point that is really for car and motorcycle companies to drive. And we as citizens have to keep pushing for each one of them.

 

Invest in debugging roads for bad design and deadly geometry

At least 10 percent of the funds going into new road infrastructure should be spent on debugging existing roads for safety. Disappearing lanes, missing or misleading signage, badly-designed intersections, and other similarly deadly road geometry must be addressed.

The crash that killed Cyrus Mistry in 2022 was at a point where three lanes on the highway suddenly became two without any warning signage or road markings. But that hasn’t changed things at the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI). At the busy border between Delhi and Gurugram on NH-8, there are 18 south-bound lanes that become nine within about 500 metres, again without any visible signage or road markings. I’m sure every VVIP in India has gone over this patch, but it remains this way.

 

Make highways and streets less car-centric, give people space

Highways and streets that are not inclusive should also be treated as buggy and to be fixed. Our highway and street infrastructure is very car-centric; it is designed by the rich, for the rich. But very few people in India travel by car. Many people walk, or cycle, or take shared autos or buses, or ply slow-moving rickshaws or bullock carts or tractors.

Our highways have almost no provisions for this silent majority, even when these highways are cutting through villages and towns. Our city streets are designed as wannabe highways and just as bad.

Even in a city like Gurugram, along the length of the swooping NH-48 or the glitzy Golf Course Road or any other street, there is hardly any safe way to walk across or cycle across safely and conveniently.

Our concept of smart cities needs to emphasize provisions for at-grade crossings every few hundred metres in residential and commercial areas, bicycle lanes, and thoughtful plans for slow-moving and non-motorized traffic.

 

Get serious about speed limits, they are the easiest way to save lives

Every stretch of road should have speed limits posted for all to see. Every fatal accident there involving vehicles that weren’t speeding should lead to a reduction in that speed limit. Even the worst-designed road and the worst driver cannot take lives if speeds are low. Hence, speed limits are the easiest way to save lives.

New York City reduced its default speed limit from 30 mph (about 50 kmph) to 25 mph (about 40 kmph). It is, this year, considering reducing the speed limits further, mostly to 20 mph (about 30 kmph). Bloomberg reports that New York ended 2023 with its safest year for pedestrians since record-keeping began 114 years ago, with 101 pedestrian deaths in a city of 8.5 million people. What’s more, New York had 262 traffic deaths in total in 2023, while Gurugram had about 400, with only about one-fifth of NYC’s population.

 

Enforce rules and penalize offenders with the use of digital evidence

Enforcement with digital evidence should be ubiquitous and its effectiveness at each location should be measured and reported. Enforcement today is mostly in a few local pockets and concentrated on a few revolving topics of the day, like riding a two-wheeler without a helmet or talking on the phone while driving. Instead, it should be so pervasive that anyone breaking any rule should expect to be automatically penalized. Wrong-side driving, speeding, parking illegally on the footpath or roadside, overloading vehicles — all of these must be penalized out of existence.

Digital evidence is the way forward. Speed cameras are already making some cities safer. I am personally willing to sacrifice some privacy for saving lives, even to the extent of a GPS-driven “black box” in each vehicle that stores a few hours of location and speed data.

 

Encourage a polite driving culture and dissuade road vulgarity

We have to make civility on the roads become classy and aspirational. India may boast of being an ancient civilization, a Vishwa Guru, but one could hardly infer that from a comparison of our driving culture with that in Western countries. We dart about our roads in a frenzy, leaning on the horn, sparing no thought for the pedestrians, whether aged or children or pregnant, or for  cyclists.

My company, Nagarro, recently sponsored comedian Gaurav Kapoor to make a stand-up segment on civility on the roads, or Sadak Sabhyata, which has already received two million views. As a society, we have to expand such efforts thousand-fold. Auto companies could take the lead on this, especially the luxury brands that appear to be disproportionately involved in road crashes. 

 

Manas Fuloria is the CEO and co-founder of Nagarro.