By Thanks to Nomad for pointing this unsurprising piece of information out:
Nearly four out of 10 persons who died from car accidents last year were pedestrians, a much higher figure than in other advanced nations, according to the Korea Insurance Development Institute.
The agency said yesterday that the percentage of pedestrians who died from car accidents was 38.7 percent in Korea, while the figure was 12.5 percent in France, 14.1 percent in the United States, 15.9 percent in Germany and 27.7 percent in Japan.
“Not only drivers but also pedestrians need to raise their consciousness about safety,” said an official at the institute.Among the dead from car accidents, the percentage of children younger than 14 years and elderly over 61 years also increased. The figure was 35.6 percent in 2003, up 5.9 percentage points from 2000.
The two age groups on a sharp increase are children and the elderly. I believe it from driving around here in Korea. Children will run out between cars into the middle of the road and elderly people often push carts taking up the whole right lane of a highway. So when you come around a corner you see a cart in front of your vehicle you have to brake or swerve suddenly to avoid an accident. Plus people often walk in the road instead of the sidewalk and cut across the road because they don’t want to wait for the crosswalk to turn green.
Look at the two USFK accidents that have caused such an up roar. The 2002 accident that caused that year’s hatefest involved to middle school students walking in the road. This past June’s accident involved an elderly person cutting between vehicles on the highway without using a crosswalk. The US Army and especially 2ID have gone to great lengths to improve vehicle safety. Imagine trying to drive Bradleys and tanks much less your car through all this. That is why convoy safety is so important here in Korea.
However, I think we will never have an accident free environment until the conditions here change. The police actually enforcing crosswalks and keeping people on the sidewalks would be a good place to start.
6:00 pm on February 18th, 2007 1
Well, at least for this issue, Koreans targeted the US first to get compensations. I’m wondering when those *innovative* Koreans are going to demand compensations from Japan for the *injuries and victims* of trafic accidents
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6:00 pm on February 18th, 2007 2
I really think that things won’t change over there until the attitude that “the traffic laws don’t apply to me” goes away…
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6:12 pm on February 18th, 2007 3
Respect for the law would be a good start, but when you have a president giving a mass pardon to everybody with a traffic ticket every year, what kind of message does that give out? And no one pulls over to allow the ambulance to pass, so if you’re in an accident in Korea, good luck.
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6:12 pm on February 18th, 2007 4
GI,
Just when I give up on you, I see some sense begin to creep into your thick skull.
Korea is a killing field.
Why? Because Korea has been culturally degraded by its own under-tow of Korean shamanism.
Shamanism is a folk religion that re-inforces psychological narcissism both individually and collectively: a spirituality of self-absorption, high self-esteem, and defiance to the “other”.
Not all cultures are morally equal… and thus, a culture’s depravity cannot merely be remedied by infrastructure improvements and education.
Same goes for Iraq.
The two-squashed Angels were examples of Korean shamanism’s cultural effects: “Lack of situational awareness” and unconscious defiance to the foreign “other”. The two-Angels did what Koreans statistically do — get themselves stupidly killed with this lethal pride.
The travesty was not the two-angels being used to politically abuse USFK (we can be assured the two girls are both happily sitting in the lap of the Dr. Martin Luther King as we speak) — the insult was your leaders weeping like sensitive gay soldiers burdened with stupid white guilt — when they should have recognized the Koreans were shaking-down USFK like a collective Reverand Jesse Jackson.
Is that what General Douglas MacArthur would have done?
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12:35 pm on March 8th, 2008 5
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8:26 am on March 19th, 2008 6
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