This is a holiday weekend in Hong Kong, and while I don’t know as many families making road trip plans as they would in larger countries, it does seem like an appropriate Friday to share this reminder of road safety.
This week’s photo is of the sign just south of the exit from the Aberdeen tunnel, and compares the 14,231 traffic casualties to date with the 20,001 from last year. These numbers both seem unrealistically high for a population of only about 7 million, and also remarkably “on schedule” – when I took the photo yesterday exactly 71.4% of the year 2013 had elapsed, and the number of traffic deaths year to date was 71.2% of last year’s total number. I only have a vague memory of what these numbers were in past years, but the annual number never seemed far from 20,000.
Traffic deaths and injuries are somehow an all too easily accepted or quickly forgotten fact of life, and after tax policy it is probably one issue too many people in almost any country seem quite uninterested in doing much to improve. One reason I had to leave the San Francisco Bay area was that I grew tired of hearing of that morning’s “fatal car crash” on the radio during my daily commute, wondering when my number would come up in a place where there is little alternative to driving. Hong Kong is blessed with excellent public transport, which even still not 100% hazard free, does make me feel safer in letting me stay off the road more than I could elsewhere. I still do not have the courage to drive in mainland China, but if I do get the opportunity to, I hope to do the drives there with the greatest return on risk to my safety…
