Opinion

Real Traffic Safety

By SCOTT T. HARDS

A few weeks ago Japan went through one of its semi-annual traffic safety campaigns. During these week-long efforts, police officers appear at major intersections and play human traffic light (even though the mechanical ones are working just fine), and little awnings from under which local residents watch over the flow are set up at street corners around town. I cannot help but notice, however, that the people who sit in those little tents seem to do little more than drink tea and munch senbei crackers. The whole exercise seems to have become more of a festival than any serious attempt to get people to drive more safely.

Mind you, Japan has very safe roads overall. The manners of most drivers and their safety records compare quite favorably to those of other advanced nations. What bothers me is not the death toll here, but the other traffic annoyances that could be easily erased if a concerted effort were made.

What am I talking about? High-school boys riding two and three people on a 50cc scooter. Newspaper and soba delivery people on bikes driving down the sidewalk, without any helmets. All sorts of vehicles with illegally modified mufflers blasting 100 or more decibels of sound at all hours of the day and night. Hot-rodders zooming through red lights and down narrow residential streets at up to 70 or 80 kph. Taxi drivers slamming on their brakes in a desperate effort to pick up a customer that has just flagged them, or squealing their tires in a high-speed right turn through an intersection several seconds after their right-turn arrow has vanished. I see (and hear!) violations like these every day in my neighborhood; these are not rare occurrences by any means.

So what can be done? Nothing sophisticated is required, just a good old-fashioned crackdown by police on their white bikes armed with nothing more than their ticket pads. These offenses occur simply because there is no or lax enforcement. Even when giving out parking tickets, Japanese police mark the tires of the offending vehicles with chalk first and give drivers several minutes to move before actually assessing fines.

Forget the chalk! If they immediately wrote tickets, you can bet illegal parking would drop dramatically. The same approach, if applied to moving violations, would no doubt help shrink Japan's roster of traffic accident victims.

This country's approach to traffic safety, as with many problems, is to simply ask people nicely to cooperate. That may work on 90 percent of the drivers on the roads, but it's the other 10 percent that are waking me up in the middle of the night, or running me off of the sidewalk. Stop by your local koban and put a bug in the ear of the police officer there. It just may help!

Shukan ST: May 9, 1997

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