In China, security camera footage across multiple years shows drivers accidentally striking passersby, realizing their error, and subsequently rolling back over the injured pedestrians to make sure they're dead.

Why?

According to Geoffrey Sant, a professor at Fordham Law School and board member at the New York Chinese Cultural Center, if a driver in China hits a pedestrian, the goal isn't to minimize damage. It's to maximize it.

China's hit-to-kill mentality has been around for the better part of two decades, Sant explains in a recent article he penned for Slate.

Not only is it common, Sant says. It's embraced.

"Judges, police, and media often seem to accept rather unbelievable claims that the drivers hit the victims multiple times accidentally," he says, "or that the drivers confused the victims with inanimate objects."

People do this because of the money at stake, both present and future.

In China, it is customary after an accident for the offending party to cover the victim's medical expenses. However, this doesn't just happen once after the victim has left the hospital. It can go on for decades.

Killing the victim right away, in other words, avoids years of potentially crippling debt.

"The Chinese language even has an adage for the phenomenon," Sant writes. "'It is better to hit to kill than to hit and injure.'"

The most disgusting cases involve children. In 2010, a man driving a BMW backed out of a parking spot and accidentally struck a 3-year-old boy, security footage shows. Rather than check to see if the boy was alright, the man proceeded to roll his car over the boy's skull several times before driving off.

Sant says these cases are all too common, and rarely do the courts or public express outrage.

But sometimes they do.

In 2013, onlookers attacked a man who killed a 6-year-old with his car. News reports argued the crowd had misinformation, although numerous bystanders all agreed the man was at fault.

Tokyo has one of the lowest rates of traffic-related fatalities in the world. Yuya Shino/Reuters

Since breaking cultural traditions is easier said than done, China is unlikely to give up the practice of covering years worth of medical expenses.

Perhaps the easiest workaround is simply making pedestrian life safer — in other words, reducing the number of opportunities drivers have to hit people. China is already in the process of improving its public transit system and bike lane infrastructure through the use of physical barriers and more trains in operation.

In the short-term, China can look to Japan for cues on how to stay safer. The Greater Tokyo area boasts the most sophisticated railway system in the world, servicing 40 million people daily and has one of the lowest rates of traffic fatalities of any city.

In the future maybe it can become more like Denmark, where half the country commutes by bike and traffic fatalities are pretty much extinct.

Or, a simpler solution — just stop killing people.