U.S.A road safety scores very poor
Analyzing the International Road Safety Annual Report 2018 ” the USA does very badly again“: this is the opinion of the Advanced Drivers of North America.
Prepared by the International Traffic Safety Data and Analysis Group (IRTAD), the permanent working group on road safety of the International Transport Forum (ITF) at the OECD, the Road Safety Annual Report shows the most recent and up-to-date road safety data for 41 countries, including USA.
For the first time, road safety is a main focus of the world’s leading transport policy event, providing an opportunity to present to transport policy makers the status of road safety today.
For 2017, a decrease in the number of road deaths was reported by 20 of 29 member countries of the International Road Traffic Data and Analysis Group (IRTAD) for which preliminary fatality data are available. Four saw the number of traffic fatalities remain stable. Only five registered increases of 2% or more in road deaths compared to 2016. One of those countries are the States.
In fact the USA are 38th out of 40 countries, with a very regrettable rise of 13.5 percent in annual road deaths.
Moreover, regarding “deaths per 100,000 inhabitants”, the USA is in 33rd place in the table, from four to almost six times greater than the rate in the leading four nations, and that is an astonishing difference for such a great (and wealthy!) nation to be so far behind.
As for year-on-year progress in reducing mortality rates from 1990 through 2016, the USA is still not down to the rates that either the UK or Sweden had achieved in 1990.
Analyzing the vehicle safety standards since 2010, the number of car occupants killed in crashes has decreased in all countries except Chile (+25%) and the United States (+7%).
One of the principal reasons of this +7% is that for several years US officials have been keen to claim that higher vehicle safety standards are largely responsible for alleged improvements in the country’s traffic safety, but this result would appear to suggest otherwise.
ABOUT THE INTERNATIONAL TRANSPORT FORUM
The International Transport Forum is an intergovernmental organization with 59 member countries that organizes global dialogue for better transport. It acts as a think tank for transport policy and hosts the Annual Summit of transport ministers. The ITF is the only global body that covers all transport modes. The ITF is administratively integrated with the OECD, yet politically autonomous.