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Road Safety Annual Report 2019
It is with great pleasure that I present the 2019 edition of the Annual Report of the International Traffic Safety Data and Analysis Group (IRTAD) which contains the most recent road safety data and up to-date information for 41 countries.
The large majority of IRTAD countries recorded a decrease in the number of road deaths in the year 2017, and provisional data for 2018 show further reduction for several countries. This is good news as following good results at the beginning of the decade, the number of road deaths plateaued or even increased in several countries after 2013. Several countries that achieved a relative strong reduction in the beginning of the decade seemed to struggle to further decrease the number of road casualties. However, further research is needed
to understand why this happened, and which measures can now been taken to reverse a downward trend.
Improving road safety and the number of road casualties requires permanent and continuous actions based on the analysis of solid data. In some countries, the “easy” measures have now been implemented and to reduce further the number of road casualties, including serious injuries, it is necessary to exploit available data on the circumstances of crashes, the mechanisms leading to crashes and their severity, the road users involved, etc., as well as to undertake proactive risk assessment of the road network. It is also important to set ambitious targets not only for the number of road deaths and serious injuries, but also for a set of performance indicators, which become indissociable to an effective road safety policy. This is the core of the IRTAD work, which is striving to improve our knowledge about road safety and to offer countries a unique forum to exchange on crash data methodologies and analysis. This report is the fruit of the rich collaborative work undertaken by all IRTAD members throughout the year. Our Group now includes 80 members representing 40 countries; and I would like to thank each member warmly for its engagement and contribution.