Last night, I drove to Jerusalem for an anniversary dinner with my wife. No sooner had I joined the main road than I was ensnared in a massive traffic jam. There had been an accident. As we duly rolled past the site, I saw a mass covered in a blanket – presumably the victim of a tragic collision. When we drove home, we passed over a discoloration in the pavement – next to where the mass had been.
I checked the news this morning and saw that, indeed, a young man had been killed there. Moments later, my wife received an email. The victim had been the son of one of our children’s teachers. I can only imagine the pain in that household today. My oldest brother was killed in an accident, just after his seventh birthday. I was born a year later and grew up in a house forever scarred by what had occurred. The pain, the loss and even the anger, never quite disappear. And the pain will go beyond that family; the driver will always doubt his own decision-making.
What I saw was just a spot on the road; but it marked lifetimes of pain.
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As a new Oleh, I bucket Israeli drivers into three categories: careless, aggressive and defensive. The careless weave between lanes without any purpose. I guess they are either checking their cellphones or are otherwise too involved with their higher thoughts to actually pay attention to what they are doing. The aggressive are more predictable – zooming up before checkpoints and cutting into the traffic ahead of them. The defensive learn to fear the others, stopping sharply just before they merge with traffic – frightened of the possibilities but creating other frightening possibilities.
You would assume this combination of driving styles to be extremely deadly, but it isn’t.
Israel’s traffic fatality rate is a fraction of that in the U.S. Israel has 3.3 fatalities per 100,000 people per year and 5.2 fatalities per billion kilometers driven. The U.S. has 11.6 fatalities per 100,000 people per year and 7.6 fatalities per billion kilometers driven. In other words, you have one third the change of dying from a traffic accident here as you do in the states. And every mile you drive in the U.S. is 50% more dangerous than a mile driven here.
Why is the death rate low? First, I imagine the collision rate is quite high – but as most vehicles on most roads aren’t moving very quickly, the death rate isn’t. Distances here are also smaller – so medical attention is probably received faster.
There is another aspect of Israeli driving that I believe contributes to a low death rate. Despite being careless, aggressive or defensive (or all three, it happens), Israeli drivers are also good at reacting to situations. If the car next to us veers into our lane because the driver’s head is in the clouds, we can react. If a man darts into the road ahead of us, we can react. If the person in front of us slams on the brakes for no obvious reason, we can react. If the new Oleh screws up the signage, we can react. We are fantastic at preventing otherwise tragic situations.
I’ve been driving for 23 years without even a speeding ticket. I’m careful. But I’ve had my share of frightening experiences. All of them, both in the United States and here, have had one thing in common. Not stupid drivers – whose behavior we can only hope to change – but a lack of visibility. I’ve almost killed bicyclists because they were dressed in black – at night – without lights. I’ve almost killed pedestrians because I couldn’t see them. One time I almost killed the teenage girl who lived across the street from us; it was Earth Day and she’d decided to lay down in the middle of the street – without any illumination – to observe the night sky in a darkened Oregon city. I wasn’t driving quickly, but she had her IPod on and she didn’t hear me coming. I stopped a few feet from her head. Another time, a badly done road repair left a pipe sticking out the pavement. I didn’t see it in time to stop and it ripped open my gas tank and literally blew up my car. Thank G-d, there were no injuries.