education >>expert series

Dinesh mohan Interview

See and hear video file.

As Coordinator of the Transportation Research and Injury Prevention Programme at the Institute of Technology in New Delhi, India, Mohan's expertise lies in developing ways for varied modes of transportation to share the roadways safely.

In this interview, Mohan shares his views on: the vital role played by small communities in the world of traffic safety, the traffic safety movement in India, the societal infrastructures created by a reliance on cars, the need for speed, the importance of having demonstrative results when introducing new traffic safety measures in order to gain public support, and the diminishing opportunities to walk and bicycle in the automobile-age.

The accompanying interview was conducted at the Prevention Institute by Susanne Brunner from Swiss Public Radio.

1. Interviewer: If you compare your ride from the airport to Berkeley or to San Francisco, a ride to the airport at home, how would you describe the difference in traffic I might see on the street?

Dinesh Mohan: A main difference in the traffic in the two locations would be the homogeneity of traffic here and the non-homogeneity of traffic in Delhi and what I mean by that is we would have at least three or 4 or 5 different kinds of modes at the same time, which is bicyclists, pedestrians, 2 or 3 different kinds of non-motorised modes, which is hand-pulled carts, and within motorized modes we would see more busses, trucks, on urban streets than you see here and 3- wheeled scooter taxis, which you don’t have in the US at all. So there’s a much wider mix of vehicles and people on the streets there.

2. Interviewer: Would you say there that culture might play a role in the way traffic is perceived or the way traffic safety is perceived?

Dinesh Mohan:The word culture is a very difficult one. It means all kinds of things and most of the times it has either political or racist or other baggage with it. We do not talk about the culture of the majority. We always talk about the culture of the other, which is the minority or the "weird" people out there. In sociological terms, culture is always about the other and never about the mainstream. Mainstream doesn’t have a culture. Non-mainstream always have cultures, and culture is used as an excuse by policy makers and powerful people not to do anything. They say "well, this is our culture what can we do" or culture is used to keep, suppress and oppress people. For example, leaders of minority communities use culture to oppress women in the community to say this is our traditional way of doing things I’m going to do it this way, our children will do it this way. So it is a very difficult area, and this is why I don’t like to use culture as a determinant, because it changes meaning all the time.

3. Interviewer: Plus in traffic safety you can just say, if you use the word culture you can blame it on the other person.

Dinesh Mohan: That’s right, precisely. And so there are formal studies done in the US and in Europe looking at culture as a determinant, especially in pedestrian safety. You look at people in slums and minority neighborhoods and you find out they have more accidents; they are walking all over the place. For example, there’s a study from Sweden which shows that Turks, children born into Turkish families, have more accidents as pedestrians than others. Then they look at Turkish families and say that Turks have a fatalistic view on life because of Islam and so that’s why they don’t insist on safety because they think it’s pre-determined by God. But these are, I think, vacuous studies because they don’t really look at why people say that, what’s the background, where did these people live, do they have any other choices. When people talk about culture it’s about weaker people, and so they don’t really discuss whether the weaker people have an option to have the things the way they want them. This is not only in road safety If these people don’t have choices in other walks of life: if they don’t get the jobs they like, and they can’t send their children to the schools they like, so in general those people feel powerless. And so they won’t exert in other areas also. So they can’t even think that if they demanded better facilities for pedestrians they would get them, so they don’t even demand it. These are very difficult areas and I as a professional stay out of that. I work most on what we can do as professionals rather than finding excuses on what we can blame it on.

4. Interviewer: How are people concerned with traffic safety in India?

Dinesh Mohan: There is a tremendous concern. The government keeps talking about road safety and what they should do and they translate that concern into television campaigns or ads in Headlinespapers or articles in Headlinespapers and posters and so on. In every Indian city you see billboards on the roads telling people how to be safe, to drive safely. But we know from experience here that that doesn’t really change things much. You also see the peoples’ anger, for example in India it’s true, in Egypt it’s true, in Malaysia, Indonesia, sometimes China. When a truck or a bus hits a pedestrian or bicyclist and if the driver doesn’t run away from the scene of the accident, he gets lynched, and every second day some bus or truck gets burnt because it has run over a pedestrian or especially a child. If a child is hit by a bus or truck it gets burnt by the crowd. So to me this is ample evidence that the people do not take the existence of accidents as something acceptable. What people are saying by indulging in this violence on the streets is that it’s not acceptable. It’s not acceptable to have your kids killed on the street. The second evidence we have is that road humps are coming all over the place, even on the intercity roads, so that if a child gets killed on an intercity highway--and these are not limited access highways, these are open highways--if a child gets killed on a highway in a village, the villagers go to the local politician, force the politician to get the engineer to get a road hump on the highway. Now there are very few villages left in India where you don’t have a road hump when the road goes through a village. And similarly in a lot of residential neighborhoods in cities people are putting up road humps all over the place, and as far as the government is concerned, these humps are all illegal, but they can’t do anything to stop them. So there’s, I would say, a people’s movement for safety without realizing it.

5. Interviewer: You mentioned this kind of measure-people putting up road humps. Do they help?

Dinesh Mohan: We are doing a project for the government right now to look at traffic calming on highways going through villages. We’ve done an initial survey and asked the villagers where these road humps have gone up and asked them about the number of deaths in the villages. It appears that deaths disappear after the road humps are put up.

6. Interviewer:Based on that, how would you say communities should go best about developing action plans for improving safety on the streets for pedestrians, bicyclists, motorists.

Dinesh Mohan: The critical issue is speed, and that’s something that transportation planners don’t like, something that economists don’t like, because there’s an understanding that speed and money are interrelated, so the faster you go the more efficient you’ll be and the more money you’ll make, or money you save. This is a very debatable area because the US has lower speed limits than Germany. Could you correlate the economies of the two countries based on speed limits? If the Americans are driving slower on the highways, is the US economy suffering? But to come back to your question--that first is we have to reduce speeds wherever there are people walking or bicycling. In general, you have enough data from this country and from other countries that speed is so critical to the number of accidents. So you see, the number of accidents on highways in the US, on turnpikes, coming down dramatically as soon as the speed limit is reduced from 65 to 55. And the reverse has happened in the past few years, in that the states which increased the speed limit have larger number of deaths. So we have enough evidence that this is independent variable as far as safety is concerned.

7. Interviewer: But as you said, it seems to be very difficult to persuade governments to persuade people that they have to step away from the gas pedal in order to save lives.

Dinesh Mohan: Well, there was a lot of work in 1930’s to the 70’s, on science technology and society and how technology and society influence each other.Some of that work also discussed issues of the social imprints of technology. Which meant that all technologies when they come up or are inventedhave the social imprint of the society and the conditions in which the technology evolves. To put it in other words, once a car is invented it carries with it the social concerns of that time of the people who used the car and invented the car. And that concern had to do with speed, it had to do with living separately; it had to do with "freedom" etc. Once you introduce a car, whether its in India or Kenya or Uganda or Sweden or the US, the car will demand highwaysIt will demand that it has to go fast, the car will demand that there should be wide roads, the car will demand that we don’t care about parks, and so on. So it’s the car itself that decides what happens; as long as you have cars, they cannot be controlled that easily until you have a complete change in societal values and issues over time. I’m not saying that cars will go away or we should force them to go away, but I think as we discuss such issues and our society gets concerned, because clearly we have to do something about it, it’s possible that in the future that we will invent and come up with newer ways of dealing with access and mobility.

8. Interviewer: Where would you suggest you start as a community, I mean a community that wants to raise traffic awareness that wants to become safer? Where would you start within that context?

Dinesh Mohan: I think one should start from neighborhoods because that’s where you have more agreement, like its happened in Europe, where its been much easier to do traffic calming in residential neighborhoods, around schools to start with. It takes long time to get accepted. We’ve been doing traffic calming on our University campus in Delhi. I couldn’t step out of my office and not get yelled at by some other faculty member within 15 minutes because there were these speed humps on our roads as traffic calming devices on campus.Everyone was really upset that the cars were being slowed downYou have a technology which can go fast and you’re forcing the technology not to operate at its optimum level, and so people get very angry.It takes time. It took a year. People get tired after a while, and then you start getting evidence. We have evidence now that before we did this there used to be at least one minor accident per week on campus which is approximately 400 acres of faculty housing and University, and then after traffic calming we hardly get one every two months. Once the evidence starts coming in that people are not getting hurt, then things start shifting. The majority thinks it’s a good idea. You have to have demonstration projects, you have to show that it works, and it’s not harming people, in fact our children are not getting hurt, and I think we have to start from there. Demonstration projects where families live and work, in neighborhoods, then shopping areas, then around schools, then campuses and large corporations where someone has control over design. University areas where you can get such movements going, and once there is evidence that it works, then you go to a wider arena. I think you have to start talking about different travel modes. How do we use the future technologies for this? We have to start discussing shared ownership of vehicles, so that we use different kinds of vehicles for different kinds of needs, so you don’t need a large car to travel in the city--you need a large car to travel out of the city. Maybe you don’t need to own a car, and anytime you need a car a car should be available on rent. And that could be a very small car inside the city which cannot go over 50km an hour, by design. We should think of using our computer systems, our communication technologies, our optimization systems, which are now available to change our thinking about mobility. Maybe we will be forced to do it for other reasons, for outside concerns, for pollution concerns I think communities are concerned about pollution, are concerned with greenhouse gasses, I think they are concerned about the ozone layer, even the most conservative politicians cannot oppose these concerns, at least on the surface. We have to use those concerns to start doing the things we are talking about. I think there has to be a combination of environmental issues and safety issues to move forward.

9. Interviewer: When I go back to your neighborhood model I imagine a neighborhood here where probably 50% of the people own SUVs, own large cars to drive around in the city, And everybody has a car or 2 cars, and then there these issues neighbors might have a meeting, get together, and these issues arise, it seems to me, technology is one thing but to get it into peoples’ minds that a car is maybe not the most private thing, that you might have shared ownership, or that you might have to say that I’m going to drive around in the city in a small electric car, seems to be a huge barrier. Do you have an example on another level where you can see that it can work with enough persuasion, with a model, maybe going back to you University model? You had staff members, faculty members yelling at you, but at one point it must have gotten started.

Dinesh Mohan: Well that was because there was a concern, we were asked to do something, we produced a plan, and the president of the university agreed to carry it out, and we had discussions and people didn’t realize how bad it was. But I think things happen, and my experience is that the same people who want a road hump in their neighborhood in front of their house so that their children don’t get hurt by speeding cars, these people curse when they find a road hump in front of someone else’s house because they have to slow down. I think we have to use these selfish motives in a sense that you find out where children are getting hurt and you start form there and you get the people that live there to support you. Once it starts spreading, you find out-it’s like Indian villages--that first people don’t want the children to get killed in their villages but don’t mind it happening in other villages, but in a system it happens everywhere. Once people start saying children shouldn’t be getting killed in front of my house, then they won’t get killed in front of every house, once it starts. So there’s no question of individuality here.This is a very difficult area in the political domain because people are very concerned with individual rights but individual rights that people are concerned about has to do with property. The right to life is not like the right to property because you can have more property or less property as your own personal property. But the right to life has been agreed upon as an unalienable right, which means there is no debate. We cannot have a vote on it. It’s an equal right for everyone and unless that is understood, the issue changes and people will take time to understand that in modern society we are not free in what we do. We don’t choose our public spaces, we don’t choose what road we want to go on, we don’t choose what time to go somewhere. We are forced to go to work at a particular time, or in a University the classes are at a particular time. You have to go there at that time no matter how well you feel and no matter if you have a hangover or not. Modern lives operate around issues where we don’t have freedom. And when we don’t have freedom then the civil society has to make sure that you don’t get harmed when you’re involved in that public domain.

10. Interviewer: So that would mean awareness campaign of a whole different kind in that sense, that you’re basically saying telling people these are the values that we agreed on, reminding them that their valid for traffic safety, it seems to me.

Dinesh Mohan: People have a feeling that it’s valid, but the formal systems which make them feel from other value systems, political systems, economic systems, that you shouldn’t accept it. People are scared of government’s influence on their lives, because often the government influence on their lives is not good. So we are learning how to deal with this and how communities should be able to work and demand what they need, but the bottom issue being that we need our children to run around on the streets and not get hurt. I think it’s very important to go back to that because when I was a child living in a city in India, when I came home from school at 2 in the afternoon, my parents didn’t know where I was. I could run around the house, go to my neighbors, pick up my bike and go to get an ice cream. When I wanted to go to my soccer lesson I could just pick up my bike and go at 4 and play soccer and come back. I didn’t have to ask my parents because they weren’t scared I would get killed on the road. But today the same person who did this 40 years ago doesn’t let his daughter do it, so my daughter doesn’t have the freedom I had--to have friends, get music lessons, soccer lessons, and not to have arguments with her parents. My daughter had arguments with me every second day about when we could drop her somewhere or pick her up from somewhere else or pick her up from the swimming pool, or take her to her friend’s place, and it’s oppressive for her. I think we should talk about this lack of freedom because people can’t walk and cycle.

11. Interviewer: As an engineer, you spend a lot of time talking about broader issues, talking about almost philosophical issues, instead of really getting down to the technical details, why?

Dinesh Mohan: Maybe I shouldn’t have been an engineer! I have done quite a bit of technical work in biomechanics, which I think is reasonable, but I never enjoyed very narrow mathematical equations and pages and pages of mathematical machismo. Especially after going back from the US to India and not being successful as much as I would like to have been in doing things which I thought were correct or having the government institute things which were correct, one starts thinking why not. Especially in the area of road safety-you see that out of 170 or 180 odd nations, only 20 or 30 have been successful in reducing death rates by policy. And if 150 are not successful in reducing death rates by policy, when so much is known already, one couldn’t say that people in those 150 nations are stupid, criminals, unconcerned. It must be untrue because you have this huge cafeteria of countries in size, culture, and religion and so on. If none of them are successful in reducing deaths and injuries on the road in the short run, compared to Western Europe and North America, it couldn’t be that people are just stupid, or people don’t care, or people don’t know. There must be other things happening, which are stronger than the knowledge we have. So you start looking at why this happens and it starts giving you other ideas. Some of these are: it ‘s more complex, it’s more difficult, you haven’t done enough work. It is very similar actually to what happened here. We think people are using their seatbelts, why can’t they elsewhere, but it took 40 years to get people to do so here.

12. Interviewer: What impact have the professionals had? You mentioned the professionals before, that they did have an impact.

Dinesh Mohan: Well in the mid 60’s-late 60’s especially, and into the early 70’s, there were professionals like Bill Haddon who was the first administrator of the now National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, there was (Hugh de Haven) who did studies on falls, there was John Stapp who looked at what forces people could withstand on deceleration rocket sleds, there were others in public health who started talking about injuries and accidents., In the US people like Bill Haddon said you cannot use the word accident because the word gives you a feeling of inevitably. Instead we should use the words injuries and crashes and so on. They introduced a science to it and they brought public health models into the issue. They started changing the ways professionals looked at and studied crashes on the road. Therefore, different kinds of studies got done. As long as we were blaming victims for what happened to them we designed our studies differently. You study the victims’ behavior. But once you say that we must deal with it as an issue of public health, then you stop looking at the fault, you start looking at factors which are associated with an event, and I think that changed the way research is done. And once it changed, the way research is done, we got different solutions.