jonathan18:

Geektastic:

bakewells5856: if you want to see some really bad driving then maybe you should visit a 3rd world country

I spent 6 weeks in Cambodia last year.

It wasn't THAT much worse to be honest.

Perhaps it's a problem with lumping all "third world" countries together, as if they all share the same driving characteristics? My experience of being on the road in India during two different trips (one in the north; the other in the south) is that it's in another league to here. While I find many drivers bad in NZ, I don't have to frequently consider my mortality whenever I go on the open road! What is relatively rare here - eg treating the lane going the opposite direction as yet another lane for your own use, despite it having a steady flow of traffic going against you - is pretty much bog standard driving in India. Combine such driving "techniques" with many vehicles there lacking rudimentary "safety" features like seatbelts (and those that do often not being used), it's certainly the wild west of driving.

(I recall articles a few weeks back about the many new but cheap cars in India getting really low safety ratings - with the focus on the lowest possible price, even something we now see as standard like airbags are not present in these cars!)