America’s roads are among the world’s busiest and India’s are among the world’s bloodiest. The two countries are now joining forces to try to develop the smart streets of the future.

In the latest proof of their tightening ties, the two countries last week agreed to cooperate on road safety as part of a broader Memorandum of Cooperation signed by United States Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx, during his visit to New Delhi.

As India starts to ramp up its road network, the U.S. will share the technology and know how it has developed through decades of building and maintaining its extensive network of national highways and city streets.

"We’ve encouraged them to use the U.S. as a laboratory,” Mr. Foxx told The Wall Street Journal in an interview. “We have done a lot of things right in terms of infrastructure."

By using new technology-- everything from seatbelts and airbags to better designed roads and street lamps--the U.S. has been able to slash the number of deaths on the highways by 80% since the 1960s, Mr. Foxx said.

A World Health Organization report in 2013 estimated that more than 230,000 people a year are killed on India’s roads. Only China sees more road fatalities.

Around 35,500 people are killed in a year on the United States roads, according to the WHO report. Even on a per-capita basis India’s roads are much more dangerous--18.9 people killed per 100,000 of the population versus 11.4 in the U.S.

When you look at the number of people killed relative to the number of vehicles, the blood on the roads in India is even more surprising.

While India has less than half the number of vehicles as the U.S., it has more than six times the number of road deaths, according to the WHO data. While in the U.S. 70% of the road deaths involve cars, in India more than half the fatalities on the roads are people on two-and-three-wheeled vehicles, trucks and buses.

Indian road safety experts are hoping the U.S. can help make Indian roads safer. The country is lacking even the most basic research about road safety, it doesn’t have a standardized method of investigating accidents or even reliable road signs, said Rohit Baluja, president of the Institute of Road Traffic Education, a road safety think tank.

“Our environment is not conducive to road safety,” Mr. Baluja said. “The U.S. and Europe have built their roads based upon more than 60 years of research.”

The U.S. has already helped India start to standardize its method for catching drunk drivers using breathalyzers and is ready to share its methods for monitoring nationwide trends in traffic accidents as well as road quality.

During Secretary Foxx’s visit, the transportation department agreed to help develop three smart cities in India -- Vizag in Andhra Pradesh, Ajmer in Rajasthan, and Allahabad in Uttar Pradesh.

“There is probably some low hanging fruit,” the U.S. can help grab, Mr. Foxx said. “India has got a shot of thinking ahead of its problems,” he said, where “a more developed nation may have trouble retrofitting.”

--Santanu Choudhury contributed to this post.

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