EU fact of the week
date: 05/04/2019
Fewer people died on European roads in 2018 but more efforts needed to half road deaths by 2020
In 2018, there were around 25,100 fatalities in EU road accidents according to preliminary figures published on 4 April by the European Commission. This is a decrease of 21% compared to 2010 and 1% compared to 2017. With an average of 49 road deaths per one million inhabitants, this confirms that European roads are by far the safest in the world. But it also shows the EU is not on track to reach the target of halving the number of road deaths by 2020. The EU countries with the best road safety results in 2018 were the United Kingdom (28 deaths/million inhabitants), Denmark (30/million), Ireland (31/million) and Sweden (32/million). Countries with a higher-than-average decrease in road deaths from 2017 to 2018 were Slovenia (-13%), Lithuania (-11%), Bulgaria (-9%) and Slovakia and Cyprus (both -8%). The countries with the highest fatality rate were Romania (96/million), Bulgaria (88/million), Latvia (78/million) and Croatia (77/million).