Word: traffics
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...motorbike to work in Kuala Lumpur one morning last year when an irritating drizzle suddenly billowed into a blinding tropical downpour. Spotting a flyover a few hundred meters ahead on the highway, Raja raced for shelter. A dozen fellow bikers were there already. As three lanes of rush-hour traffic continued to roar past, more bikers squeezed in, huddling together and turning their backs to the windblown rain and the heavy spray from passing vehicles. Raja lit a cigarette, then tilted one of his rear-view mirrors to check just how bedraggled he looked...
...millions of other Asian motorists, the odds aren't a whole lot better. One of the dismaying side effects of the region's economic growth?and the accompanying boom in motor-vehicle purchases by the newly prosperous?has been a staggeringly high traffic-fatality rate. With just 16% of the world's cars, trucks, buses and motorcycles, Asia accounts for more than half of the roughly 1.2 million traffic fatalities that the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates occur globally every year. More than 600,000 Asians are killed and another 9.4 million are severely injured in traffic accidents annually...
...roads in record numbers, crash rates are growing out of control. Car ownership in China jumped 41% between 1999 and 2002, while over the same period accidents increased twice as fast, by more than 83%. P.K. Sikdar, director of the Central Road Research Institute, a New Delhi-based traffic consultancy, ranks the carnage in India right up there with his country's natural disasters?except that "earthquakes and cyclones don't come every year. Road accidents come routinely," he says. "Like clockwork, more than 80,000 people [a year] simply get wiped out on our roads...
...Asia's motorists are plagued by hazards faced by travelers everywhere: drunk drivers, bad weather, heavy traffic. But developing countries harbor a host of other factors that heighten the peril. With car and motorcycle sales rising fast, deficit-ridden governments are hard-pressed to build wider, safer highways to accommodate swarms of new commuters. In poorer nations, existing road systems are often badly maintained and lack basic infrastructure such as stop signs and traffic signals. Traffic in Asia is frequently a tumultuous and deadly mix of pedestrians, affordable (but highly vulnerable) motorcycles, cars, pickup trucks ferrying loads of passengers...
...Strait is alive with activity: there are container vessels, fishing trawlers, supply barges, pleasure yachts and the small craft of Torres Strait Islanders and visiting Papua New Guineans. Among them are the boats of people trying to exploit cracks in the system to fish illegally and traffic in drugs, firearms and people. Starting on Thursday Island, the region's administrative hub, Time tags along with marine and land-based Customs officers to find out exactly what border protection means in this key outpost. "It's busy - or it's busier," says Steve Jeffs, Customs' Torres Strait district manager...