A planet with two billion cars

Road block: Economists predict that there will be two billion motor vehicles on the roads by 2030, as private vehicle ownership spreads to the developing world. The image shows an urban motorway in Beijing, China. (Photo: Bev Sykes.) From the sheer amount of bad news coming through the 24/7 news cycle, one may get the impression that the world is on the road to apocalypse. To counter this impression, the German news magazine Der Spiegel now publishes one trend every week that points in the right direction. Diseases have been eradicated, child labour reduced, fl ying is safer, etc. One of these silver linings concerns road traffi c deaths in Germany. They peaked in 1970 at a horrifi c 58 people dying on the roads per day. Back then, the comparison often used to convince people afraid of fl ying was that the massacre on the roads corresponded to one fully booked jumbo jet crashing out of the skies over Western Germany every single week. Thanks to a lot of legislation and innovation both in road design and in vehicle construction, this fi gure has been reduced by a factor of six, to fewer than 10 deaths per day in 2015. That corresponds to just under 50 deaths per million inhabitants per year. Sweden and the Netherlands perform even better, but most of the world does much worse. The global spread of vehicle ownership has been projected to double the fi gure of motor vehicles on the road from one billion in 2010 to two billion in 2030. As this trend collides with poor standards of infrastructure design in the developing world and high population density in new megacities, the slaughter that was once deemed acceptable in Europe will be repeated on a much larger scale around the world. The WHO estimates that the current global death toll on the roads of 1.4 million per year will rise to 1.8 million by 2030. Seen as a global epidemic, road traffi c is deadlier than malaria. And that’s just the acute impact of accidents — the long-term effects of chronic pollution will add to the death toll.