More Traffic, Killing More People
Some of these vehicles are more deadly than the others. From this spreadsheet, data via The Sunday Times and SL Police
Traffic accidents in Sri Lanka are on the rise. I and Mahina Bongso
- Drivers without license – 25% of accidents are caused by people without licenses.
- Insurance practices – encourages accidents, ads offer an air ticket for claims, or make getting in an accident seem like winning the lottery.
- Road conditions
- Points system on the license – someone with one accident a year is treated the same as someone with none. There’s no record attached to your license, though there will be soon.
- Vehicle conditions
- Fatigue of drivers – Motor Traffic Act says you can’t drive for more than four hours. Which I didn’t know.
- Speeding – the objective is to get as many offenses as possible. Objective should be reduction of accidents.
To a degree more accidents will happen as we get more vehicles. Which has happened, current tax increases nonwithstanding. That degree is exacerbated, however, when you get more vehicles and the same culture and roads. First thing seems to be getting a login and user accounts, ie drivers licenses, and connecting that to incentives and punishments (ie insurance and prosecution).
Then there are broader changes to the roads and infrastructure (expressways to segregate long-haul traffic, better lighting) but I think those are honestly secondary to the basic policy and personal changes that could be effected, like, now.
Not to quote Ice Cube, but the Sri Lankan police are hardly beloved. A 
I just gave a talk at the University Of Sri Jayawardenapura along with Reeza Zarook of Anything.lk and Rohan Jayaweera of Google. These are my notes: Devin Jayasundara asked me for a subject for this talk and I told him Internet property. But I talked to my fiancé Shru and she had a better idea. Startups aren’t about creating property at all, not really. They’re about creating territory, about creating land.
I haven’t been blogging much, I know. It’s partly because we’ve been doing a lot of work on YAMU, especially shipping 1.0.1 of the Android app today. It’s on the 
I met an old-timer who said they used to drop acid and sleep atop Sigiriya, but the place has taken on a more commercial and quasi-spiritual role now. It was built by a king as a sort of retreat and used as a monastery. Now it’s a prime tourist and cultural destination. Hence it’s a bit odd to see a Japanese beer commercial shot up there. There’s a bunch of people eating, um, deep fried cream filled coconuts and then drinking some bracing beer. I hear the whole thing cost Rs. 25,000 (I’m presuming they used stock images).
The problem is not more vehicles on the roads. The problem is that the authorities haven’t done their job and got cracking on the issues mentioned by the expert. Even the sudden increase in the number of vehicles is due to haphazard policies of the government.
Deputy minister Siyambalapitiya was saying we had one vehicle for every four people, as if to justify the steep tax hike. The extent to which government politicians are disconnected from their voters is getting more apparent each day. They probably never get a chance to notice all those packed buses and trains as they’re whisked hither and thither curtained off by their escort vehicles.
If public transport was in better shape there wouldn’t be so many private vehicles on the road during rush hour and it would reduce both fuel consumption and accidents.