Today's blog follows up the immediately preceding post and offers a contrastive view of how to deal with the tragic fallout of reckless driving and other "bad" driving behaviors.
The focus is on China.
"I think each day there will be over 300 people killed on the roads, which equals to one Boeing 747 aircraft crash," says the country director of a major China safety organization.
In a country where that is only getting worse, authorities say it calls for a strong -- some might even say draconian -- response.
Enter Dr. Jin Huiqing, whose ideas have become so persuasive for many traffic authorities in China that his three decades of psychological research into drivers' psyches and behaviors -- short version, bad driving is a disease, and it can be cured -- have culminated in an empire that encompasses a company with 2,000 workers, a private college with 10,000 students and earnings of many millions of dollars annually.
"It's a sunrise industry," Jin says.
Jin's philosophy is assuredly contrasting to the typical Western method of being primarily reactive to deficient driving behavior, i.e., the police stopping and dealing with a motorist after noting a display of bad driving.
Jin deals with it far before that. Indeed, his researchers run would-be drivers through a comprehensive gamut of psychological, emotional and physical testing before they ever get near a vehicle or have an opportunity to test for a license. Bad "traits" are identified, attitudes toward danger and risk taking are noted, personalities are dug into (passive, aggressive). Even blood tests are taken and neurological cues investigated that might discover genetic tendencies toward bad driving. .Jin says he has already found three genes that might link to accident-prone driving.
And authorities and workers' companies are sometimes notified. One city has adopted Jin's system, and multiple provinces are looking at it.
Most people in the United States would likely scoff at the notion that a genetic approach that could limit -- even flatly ban -- the right of some individuals to drive could ever gain traction here, and the country's historical canons and social mores would indeed militate against such an approach.
But as to China, where a fatal accident occurs every five minutes, such a philosophy is deemed less Orwellian than it is expedient.
Related Resource: Bloomberg, "Chinese doctor sets out to 'cure' bad driving" July 15, 2011
