2023-05-08 16:02:00
08 mayo 2023
As every May 9, Europe Day is celebrated, a unique occasion to raise awareness of the efforts of the European Union (EU) in terms of road safety. All member states collaborate actively with the aim of preventing deaths from traffic accidents on their roads. And there is progress, albeit very slowly.
The most recent figures on traffic accidents in the EU show how many of these measures have been effective, but also that there is still a lot of work to be done. While in 2011 we had to regret the 55,000 deaths that occurred on European roads, in 2022 that figure was much lower (despite having recovered the volume of traffic that its roads supported from before the pandemic): 20,600 deaths . But it’s still not enough. Both the European Union and the United Nations aim to reduce these deaths by at least half by the next year 2030.
The big differences between the different EU countries
The figures handled by the European Union clearly show that not all roads in member countries are equally safe for drivers. According to their data, the roads that register the least mortality are found in Sweden (with 21 fatalities per million inhabitants) and Denmark (26 fatalities per million inhabitants).
At the opposite extreme would be those of Romania (with 86 fatalities per million inhabitants) and Bulgaria (78 fatalities per million inhabitants) that reported the highest rates of road mortality during the past 2022.
Evolution of the number of fatalities in traffic accidents in the European Union
In general, the average for the countries of the Union was 46 road deaths per million inhabitants. Spain is within the group in which this type of death has remained quite stable (if compared with the data that was handled in the previous three years), along with others such as France, Italy and the Netherlands.
Cyclists most at risk
Although the Commission is still dealing with preliminary data (the final ones will be published in the autumn of 2023), there are already some clues as to who is the most vulnerable on European roads. The preliminary conclusion is that in urban areas, those who suffer the most accidents are cyclists.
Pedestrians, motorists and cyclists accounted for almost 70% of the total deaths in traffic accidents that took place in the urban areas of the EU, but of all these vulnerable users the data highlights the fragility of cyclists.
Preliminary number of road fatalities per million inhabitants and country, 2022
Although the increasing incorporation of the use of the bicycle as an alternative means of sustainable and ecological transport is good news, the increase in deaths among the cyclist group causes concern in the EU member states. From the European road safety bodies it is highlighted that, with the preliminary data in hand, cyclists are the only group of road users whose numbers of fatalities have not experienced a significant decrease.
For example, in France the number of fatalities in this group increased by 30% if the data for 2022 is compared with that for 2019. A fact that the EU takes very much into account and that it wants to highlight to warn its member states of a problem that seems to grow while the others are oriented little by little to improve the figures.
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