List of countries by traffic-related death rate

Legend

This list of countries by traffic-related death rate shows the annual number of road fatalities per capita per year, per amount of motor vehicles and per vehicle-km in some countries in the year the data was collected.

According to the World Health Organization, road traffic injuries caused an estimated 1.25 million deaths worldwide in the year 2010. That is, one person is killed every 25 seconds. Only 28 countries, representing 449 million people (7% of the world's population), have adequate laws that address all five risk factors (speed, drink–driving, helmets, seat-belts and child restraints). Over a third of road traffic deaths in low- and middle-income countries are among pedestrians and cyclists. However, less than 35% of low- and middle-income countries have policies in place to protect these road users.

The average rate was 17.4 per 100,000 people. Low-income countries now have the highest annual road traffic fatality rates, at 24.1 per 100 000, while the rate in high-income countries is lowest, at 9.2 per 100 000.

74% per cent of road traffic deaths occur in middle-income countries, which account for only 53% of the world's registered vehicles. In low-income countries it is even worse. Only 1% of the world's registered cars produce 16% of world's road traffic deaths. This indicates that these countries bear a disproportionately high burden of road traffic deaths relative to their level of motorization.

There are large disparities in road traffic death rates between regions. The risk of dying as a result of a road traffic injury is highest in the African Region (increasing 26.6 per 100 000 population), and lowest in the European Region (decreasing 9.3 per 100 000).

Half of the world's road traffic deaths occur among motorcyclists (23%), pedestrians (22%) and cyclists (5%) – i.e. "vulnerable road users" – with 31% of deaths among car occupants and the remaining 19% among unspecified road users.

Adults aged between 15 and 44 years account for 59% of global road traffic deaths. 77% road deaths are among men.

The total fatalities figures comes from the WHO report (table A2, column point estimate, pp. 264–271) and are often an adjusted number of road traffic fatalities in order to reflect the different reporting and counting methods among the many countries (e.g. "a death after how many days since accident event is still counted as a road fatality?" (by standard adjusted to a 30 days period), or "to compensate for underreporting in some countries", see WHO report pp. 62–74).

The table shows that the highest death tolls tend to be in African countries, and the lowest in European countries. The table first lists geograhic regions before alphabetically sorted countries. A comparison between left-handed and right-handed traffic cannot be done without taking into account a variety of confounding factors such as the degree of compliance with traffic regulations, the level of policing, GDP per capita, the median/mode of the age of cars and many more.

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