Statistics

Parents Against Road Tragedies - Home Page 

Although generally a dry subject, and easily manipulated to make misleading points, statistics are crucial to the understanding and advancement of road safety.

In this section of the PART website are various charts and tables that are intended to highlight aspects about which readers may be unaware, such as individual countries' successes or failures in reducing the overall numbers of people killed in road crashes. It is PART's position on this topic that the only truly worthwhile goal is one of creating significant reductions in the annual number of overall road deaths, not merely a reduction in the rate of road deaths.  Indeed, it is easy to show that when the growth in vehicle numbers or the level of human population is swift, it is not uncommon for the rate of road deaths to decrease even though the actual number of fatalities has gone up.

For a comparative list of the latest IRTAD data regarding road deaths and injuries in 28 member-countries of the OECD (i.e. most of the developed nations of the world), click here, and for a revealing graph click here.

In addition to deaths as a proportion of the population ( the per capita rate), another way to measure road deaths is relative to the total distance traveled in any given year by all of the vehicles collectively, in any specific country. The international norm for this approach is deaths per billion vehicle kilometres.

The Drive and Stay Alive website carries statistical data which may be accessed here.  In particular, there is a table showing international road crash fatality rates, 1988-2002, including the rates at which various countries reduced their own overall traffic fatalities during that period.

In the ten years from 1992-2001, the USA made the least progress of all in cutting the overall number of road deaths (i.e. by only 4 percent) and then, between 2000-2005, experienced an actual increase of 3.6 percent in overall deaths, rather than a decrease.  Only two countries experienced an overall rise in deaths over the latter, five-year period in question – Hungary and the USA – whereas eleven other countries achieved reductions between 20-40 percent in overall road deaths during the same period. Indeed, nine of those eleven countries had made reductions averaging exactly 30 percent in overall deaths during the earlier 1992-2001 period, too.  Click here for the 2000-05 details.