Road safety in Europe
[4][5] The European Commission (EC) has laid out a plan entitled Vision Zero which endeavours to reduce the incidence of road induced fatalities to a rate of zero by the year 2050.
[7] In 2021, the European Investment Bank signed an agreement with the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe to strengthen collaboration in the fields of road safety and climate resilient transport infrastructure.
[8] The Commissioner of Transport of the EU considers road safety as a key European success story.
[13] The World Health Organization issued a European Status Report on road safety.
Road safety policy making in the EU falls jointly on the European institutions and member states; and it is the European Commission (EC) which has a particularly important role in overseeing road safety policy across the Union.
Each year road crashes generate about 120,000 fatalities and 2.4 million injuries in the European region of the World Health Organization.
To obtain this figure all countries of the EU needed to align on a common standardized medical definition of what constitutes a serious road injury.
[20] In Europe, for every person killed in traffic crashes, many more[quantify] suffer serious injuries with life-changing consequences.
[15] Between 2010 and 2018, between 206 and 222 thousands serious injured were counted yearly for 23 EU members[21] The level of transport-related air pollution is also a major public health concern in most countries of Europe.
According to Siem Oppe of the SWOW a learning behavior appears in the changes in the level of fatalities over time:
[30] The same year, other regions have a worst fatality ratio such as the Luxembourg province of Belgium (210) and Kastamonu in Turkey (192).
These vary considerably between nations with high levels of fatalities for motorcycles where their use is more common, linked to the climate of Mediterranean countries.
This results in a star rating for roads based on how well its design would protect car occupants from being severely injured or killed if a head-on, run-off, or intersection accident occurs, with four stars representing a road with the best survivability features.
Improvements in driver training and safety features for rural roads are hoped to reduce this statistic.
[41] It is an item of debate whether the reduction in traffic accidents per 100 million miles driven over this time[42] has been due to robotic enforcement.
European countries usually have improvable[clarification needed] laws regarding speed control, drunk driving, helmets, seat belts and child car restraints.
Source: https://etsc.eu/blood-alcohol-content-bac-drink-driving-limits-across-europe In 2018, Ireland wins the PIN award 2019, is the best performer of the European Union for traffic safety, with 30 deaths per million inhabitants.
[49][50] In Serbia alone, 553 persons died in road accidents in 2022, with a total of 30 000 lives lost in the previous 30 years.
[14][quantify] Project EDWARD is the biggest Europe-wide awareness and enforcement campaign on road safety.
