RESEARCH ARTICLE
The Rural-Urban Divide in Road Safety: The Case of China
Becky P.Y. Loo*, W.S. Cheung, Shenjun Yao
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2011Volume: 5
First Page: 9
Last Page: 20
Publisher ID: TOTJ-5-9
DOI: 10.2174/1874447801105010009
Article History:
Received Date: 15/2/2011Revision Received Date: 25/3/2011
Acceptance Date: 29/3/2011
Electronic publication date: 25/5/2011
Collection year: 2011
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Mainland China accounted for about 7% of the global road fatalities in 2008. Road crashes happening on Chinese roads were deadly. On average, one person died in every four reported traffic crashes. Despite the scarcity of data, substantial rural-urban differences were found. In the rural areas, higher-order Highways, roads with no lighting and some heavy vehicles warrant particular attention from road safety administrations. In the 2000s, the average number of road fatalities per 100 crashes on Expressways quadrupled. Furthermore, the rural-urban divide was not limited to inner provinces only but was found in a large part of the country. By 2008, nearly 70% of the provincial units were having larger shares of rural population. In the long term, only a national road safety strategy will provide the necessary holistic framework for addressing the road safety problems in China systematically.