Traffic Accident Scenes
We’ve all see them. The little white right angles painted all over the streets. Some intersections are full of them. These lines identify the locations of accidents.
I remember when I bought my first car in Korea. My insurance agent brought me the proof of insurance, some information, and a free gift. The gift was a small can of paint. The paint was to keep in the car in case it was needed to mark the location of an accident. Korea has one of the highest car accident ratios of any country in the world.
According to a Harvard University paper written by two Koreans, traffic-related injures are the 4th leading cause of death in Korea, after cancer, stroke, and heart disease (I thought kimchi and green tea were supposed to prevent all of those). When broken down, as of the year 2000, traffic accidents were the number one cause of death among people aged 0 - 29, the number two cause of death to people in their 30s, and the third leading cause of death for people in their 40s. In the year 2000, there were 10,236 traffic-related deaths and 426,984 traffic-related injury. Assuming a population of 40,000,000 people, this breaks down to 1 out of every 93 people was injured in a traffic accident in the year 2000. Broken down even futher, that means that someone is injured in a car accident approximately every 70 seconds.
Traffic accident happen a lot. When people get in car accident, after the shouting and/or shoving has stopped, the drivers will break out their little cans of paint and mark off the position of each corner of the car on the road, the direction the car was traveling and sometimes the license plate numbers of the cars. Then, the will move the cars off the road to allow traffic to continue to flow.
Occasionally, you will see a stick figure of a person or the outline of a body, which usually means that is where the dead body was laying after the accident.
In the following video, I talk about the outlines, I almost get hit by a car that ran a red light, and I find the outlines of a fatal scooter accident.