A fair number of Asian countries have abnormally high accident rates due to a number of factors: loose or non-existent enforcement of traffic laws, a widespread belief that drinking improves your driving, a much higher percentage of inexperienced drivers, bad roads, and inadequate maintenance.
In the Philippines, for example, one sees billboards claiming that “Lone Star Light” is the best ale for driving. Drivers’ licenses are required, but many, if not most, drivers do not have them due to an overly bureaucratic system for obtaining new licenses. Driving schools offer courses advertising “Learn to Drive in Three Days.” Many new drivers have never even been in a car before and thus have no innate experience with such things as stopping distance or visibility. Asian obsessions with ‘losing face’ means a greater reluctance to admit mistakes and a greater propensity to refuse to yield right of way.
Widespread use of jeepneys, tricycles, kuligligs, and other odd or homemade vehicles means more breakdowns and failures. These are often used for public transportation, badly overloaded with people riding on the roofs and standing on the fenders. It is said that the maximum number of people allowed to ride in a jeepney is “Just one more.”
The people are mostly poor, so they skimp on maintenance. They also do a lot of makeshift repairs of questionable safety. Retreads are widely used.
Government corruption means that the road in front of your house may be paved or unpaved depending on who you voted for in the last election. Thus a street may be a patchwork of paved and unpaved sections. There may be no lines painted on roads, not even on national highways. The roads are mostly narrow, windy, and may be overgrown with brush and trees.
People in rural areas regard the road in front of their house as belonging to them. They will use the road to dry rice and corn, hold picnics, play basketball, etc. Dogs, children, cattle and fowl wander the roads freely. In more urban areas, people will set up fruit stands and the like in the middle of the road.
Banditry and low level insurrection are a problem as well. Though these do not count as actual ‘accidents,’ a number of people are killed every year by getting shot. Related to this is a certain amount of vigilantism, where enraged farmers will drag you from your car and beat you to death because you ran over their chicken. Local police will actually tell you to flee the scene of an accident and instead check in at the local police station for your own safety.
Few people will obey traffic signs and staying in your lane is highly optional. At railroad crossings, for example, people will attempt to pass you while you are waiting for a train, but then they have to stop because there is a train. So when the crossing gate goes back up, all lanes are filled in both directions with vehicles, none of them willing to relinquish right of way (as that would cause loss of face).
Nearly all of these problems are symptomatic of countries that are just becoming used to motor vehicles. They are greatly mitigated by experience and increasing wealth.