Near the busy ITO road junction in New Delhi, there is a large electronic scoreboard -- the sort you'd expect to find in a sports stadium -- that records the daily, monthly, and annual traffic deaths in the Indian capital. Sometimes even the daily score rises into double figures, but it has no discernible effect on the abominable manners and near-suicidal behaviour of the river of drivers flowing by.

It is exactly a century since the car claimed its first victim, a pedestrian struck down and killed near Crystal Palace, London, in 1898. A decade later, one of my own relatives was the first person to be killed by a car in Newfoundland (or so I was told as a child). And by now, vehicle accidents have killed 30 million people worldwide.

That is a toll roughly equal to all the deaths in war in this century except for the Second World War. In the United States, some two million people have been killed in or by cars since the turn of the century -- about four times as many as the total American deaths in all the country's wars since 1900. Indeed, road accidents are now the biggest single cause of death for men aged 15-44 around the world.

The last statistic comes courtesy of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, which also predicts that by 2020 road deaths will rise from ninth to third place as a cause of death for people of both sexes and all ages. You need only venture briefly onto the roads of Asia, Africa or Latin America to regard that prediction as an understatement.

Traffic fatalities in the developed countries have been falling steeply for thirty years now, even as the vehicle population of those countries doubled and doubled again. But in what we used to call the Third World, the casualty rate is soaring -- and they have not yet reached even one-tenth the rate of vehicle ownership that is normal in North America or Europe.

In Japan and Australia, the safest countries for drivers, the annual rate of deaths per 10,000 registered vehicles is only two. Nowhere in the developed world is it over five -- whereas in India it's 40 deaths per 10,000 vehicles, and in Ethiopia it's 192.

Let me put that even more starkly: the death rate per vehicle in the Third World is BETWEEN TWENTY AND A HUNDRED TIMES HIGHER than in the older industrialised countries. And if you've spent much time driving in these countries, you won't even be surprised.

Driving habits are often so aggressive that they verge on the berserk, and both drivers and pedestrians take insanely dangerous risks without batting an eyelid. What alarms the Red Cross is that these same countries are now experiencing an explosion of the car population: the number of vehicles in the world is expected to double by 2020, and double again by 2050, with almost all the growth in the developing countries.

So the forecast is for ever-increasing carnage, suffering, and waste. In its 1998 World Disasters Report, the Red Cross calculates that the annual cost of road accidents in the developing world, measured in terms of medical expenses, years of work lost by the casualties, and property damage, is now $53 billion. That is a sum equal to all the international aid receivedby the Third World.

It's all terribly serious, and the numbers are all true -- and yet something just doesn't add up. What could the gene be that makes Australians better drivers than Burmese, or Americans safer than Brazilians? There has to be something else going on.

A brief digression. The first Third World country I ever drove in was Mexico, and thirty years ago drivers there were appalling. People became two-year-olds as soon as they took the wheel.

Where there were three lanes, they made seven, even though it obviously caused lengthy traffic jams. They had a magical belief that blowing the hord loudly would make solid objects in front of them evaporate. They saw it as a matter of honour to overtake only on blind curves. And everybody explained this as a facet of Mexican national character.

But when I go to Mexico City now, it seems to me that the drivers have grown up. They mostly stay in lane, so the traffic moves as well as it did thirty years ago despite a fourfold increase in the number of cars in the city, and they use their horns no more than people in southern Europe.

Outside the big cities, on the other hand, Mexican drivers still try to kill themselves on every blind hill or curve -- but that's the key to the puzzle, for in the rural areas the drivers are mostly still first-generation car-owners. What we are actually dealing with here is not a matter of cultural style, or of rich world-poor world divergence, but simply a generational divide.

Fifty years ago, the streets and roads of America were as lethal for both drivers and pedestrians as those of India are today. Now American roads are vastly safer, even though the number of vehicles has at least tripled and average speeds, especially outside cities, have risen dramatically.

What made the difference in the United States was three things: better driver training and law enforcement; better road engineering, with more separation of fast vehicles from slow traffic and pedestrians -- but above all, time. Time for a second generation to grow up, used to cars from childhood, and likely to see them as a mere means of transport rather than an ego extension.

The same transformation has happened all across the developed world, which is why the traffic death toll has fallen so sharply there over the past 30 years. It will eventually fall in the 'Third World' too, but not until this generation of drivers are replaced by their children or gandchildren. In the meantime, if you have the choice, take a train.