Alt etter hvordan man måler kommer Thailand ut som nummer 1 eller 2 på listene med flest dødsfall årlig i trafikken.
I denne rapporten fra Bangkok Post mener de at mangel på politisk vilje står sentralt i problemet som krever så mange menneskeliv hvert år.
Hva kan gjøres?
Carnage: An analysis of Thailand's road safety
Lack of political will stands at heart of a problem which exacts a huge toll every year
Every 22 minutes, a human being dies on Thailand's roads. At 24,000 deaths a year -- the equivalent of a small city -- traffic ends more lives prematurely in this country than strokes, Aids, any single single kind of cancer, pneumonia, or diabetes. Every twentieth overall death in Thailand is a consequence of a traffic accident.
Depending on the survey, Thailand usually ranks either first or second in the list of countries with the highest rate of annual traffic deaths. To put things in perspective, a single year on Thailand's roads kills four times more people than the entire southern insurgency and counter-insurgency since 2004, or 40 times as many people as Islamic terrorism in Europe since 1980.
And this does not even account for the more than 100,000 significant but non-fatal injuries incurred on a yearly basis. And yet, there are really only two weeks a year when road safety is given the spotlight in public debate that it deserves.
Ironically, thanks to strong police presence, the festival periods (with 60 deaths per day during the recent Songkran and New Year's celebrations) feature lower death tolls than the regular daily average of around 65. In Thailand, carnage is a constant year-round companion of mobility. But why are Thailand's roads so deadly? And what can be done to change that?
Les resten hos Bangkok Post
