On September 21st 2016, there was a first incarnation of project EDWARD — European Day Without a Road Death.

Coincidentally or not, on the next day Eurostat released the updated data of persons killed in road accidents.

In this article, we’ll take a look at the Eurostat data for a ten-year period from 2005 to 2014 (the data for 2015 is incomplete and largely missing), for 24 of the EU-28 countries —the data for Bulgaria, Lithuania, Malta and Slovakia is missing.

Data preparation and visualizations were made in Python. Source code is available here.

Total traffic deaths

Each dot represents one country, horizontal blue line represents a median value for a given year, and 50% of values closest to median are inside of a box.

On average there were around 100 traffic deaths per 1,000,000 persons in 2005, and that number is constantly on the decline — in the last two years the average number was below 60 traffic deaths per million people. 2005’s average value is 2014’s outlier — a big improvement in ten years time.

If we take a look at data for each country, we can see large differences between them:

Northern countries have much safer road traffic than the rest of the Europe. First three countries on this list (UK, Sweden, Netherlands) have managed to have less than 30 traffic deaths per million people in the recent years.

Deaths by different traffic roles

Driver deaths make 64% of all traffic related deaths, passengers make 15%, and pedestrians make 21%. But the distribution is different across Europe:

In Romania there are as many pedestrian deaths as there are driver deaths! For pedestrians it is 4.5 times more dangerous to be in Romania than in Luxembourg.

Pedestrian deaths

It is repeatedly said that pedestrians are the most vulnerable group of road users, but we often hear that a lot has been done in the recent years to increase pedestrian safety. Do the numbers confirm that?

Looking at this graph, we can see that average number of pedestrian deaths per million people has decreased by 40% in 10 years. Impressive number by itself, but does it tell a whole story?