Some of the work I'm doing at the China Academy of Urban Planning and Design revolves around pedestrian safety. I've been involved in the field of pedestrian safety in one way or another for over four years, now, and whenever I travel I am the annoying person stopping to take pictures of crosswalks and traffic signs. Needless to say, China is by far the craziest place I've ever had to think about pedestrian safety.
I'll put together a longer post with lots of photos of my observations in Chongqing, but in the mean time, here are some scary/illuminating articles and posts about the pedestrian safety situation in China. Some are super academic; others are more reader-friendly. If you find the subject of traffic collisions upsetting or boring, feel free to skip this post.
First, the problem of traffic-related deaths as an increasing phenomenon in China: The Lancet recently published an all-China issue with a wide range of global health issues. Here's their article summarizing the findings from the 2010 Global Burden of Disease study (registration required), some of which relates to the relative importance of traffic injuries compared to other causes of death. This blog post nicely reflects on the Lancet article's findings, pointing out how death from traffic injuries has jumped from 10th to 4th and discussing why it isn't just because China is doing a better job of controlling diseases that used to be ranked higher. This article, from the World Health Organization, points out the effect of increasing traffic fatalities on urban mortality rates, in particular.
Second, the more pervasive problem of data collection. How do you know if the changes you're making have any effect on safety if your data is not accurate? The debate over pedestrian crash data in China rages on: the police data, which is used by the government for official reporting, does not match the death registry data, which places the figure at twice the number of deaths from injury related to traffic collisions. Here's a super academic WHO article discussing this problem. The WSJ presents one possible explanation here, that the discrepancy exists because of differences in record-keeping and methodology. This article, also through Lancet, suggests a different explanation part-way through:
"The inaccuracies may be due, in part, to deliberate under-reporting by traffic officers, who are rewarded with a higher performance ranking if fewer accidents occur within their jurisdictions."
Finally, some work has been done to analyze the traffic collision data. This article does a good job of identifying some overall trends, while this article is a bit gnarlier, comparing the intricacies of pedestrian crashes in Changsha, China and Hannover, Germany, including a section entitled "Analysis of Injury Severity by Body Regions."
As a personal anecdote, I asked for pedestrian crash data on day 2 of my internship, and have continued to press for it, to no avail. To be fair, in the US, data continues to be a challenge in almost every aspect of urban planning, as well. Recently, movements like Code for America have helped launch the idea of using data for urban planning into the forefront of the profession, and I think it's only going to get better over time. I'm not sure whether China is there, yet.
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