Improving road safety worldwide

July 2019

The Transport Research Laboratory (TRL) says that road safety requires a major transformation to halve road fatalities by 2020. Data shows that road injuries present a significant public health concern worldwide, with road crashes one of the top 10 causes of death globally.

Despite roads in the EU becoming safer each year, the reduction of road fatalities since 2010 has reached a plateau. In 2018, there were 25,100 reported road fatalities across the 28 EU member states. The average road fatality rate in 2018 was 49/1 million inhabitants, which constitutes a 1% decrease from 2017.

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TRL say there is a lot of work to do if the EU is to reach its target of reducing road fatalities and serious injury by 50% before 2020 and it is important to look at road safety as a major public health issue. With traffic volumes increasing year-on-year, driver behaviours, such as speeding and mobile phone use, are key contributors to road injury.

In addition, TRL says that it is vital for the transport sector to innovate new technologies that enable safer transport and shift gears in approaches to enforcement and education.