Killed vs. Fatal

In our travels around Bangalore, we’ve seen a couple of signs that give traffic statistics. The info across the top gives the year, then Fatal, Killed, Non-fatal and Injured. When we first read these signs, we looked at each other, dumfounded, then laughed out loud! We couldn’t figure out the difference of all the different designations and laughed at the fact that all the numbers were different.

A short time ago there was an article in The Times of India that enlightened us. We learned that Fatal means how many accidents there were in which someone was killed. Killed means how many people were killed. A non-fatal accident is just that; an accident in which no one is killed. Injured means how many people were injured in an accident.

So there you have it. By looking at the numbers you can see that there are roughly 10 times as many non-fatal as fatal accidents. It’s easy to figure out why. The traffic (audio) here is so congested it’s difficult to travel more than 40 kilometers per hour. Our guess is that the highest number of fatalities comes from automobiles hitting pedestrians or people riding bicycles or two-wheelers (motorcycles).

Yesterday morning, on the way to our apartment to pick up Jay for work, our driver Harish hit a man driving a two-wheeler. Harish said the man on the two-wheeler was driving very fast and cut right in front of him (a very typical scenario). Harish took the injured cyclist to the hospital and paid for his care. So, that’s an example of one more non-fatal accident and one person injured. Another statistic for the Bangalore city traffic police.