Accident statistics in the EU
What does it look like in the European Union now? As the European Transport Safety Council (ETSC) wrote in its February 2018 issue of PIN Flash Report 34 “Reducing Child Deaths on European Roads”, road safety for children under the age of 15 has improved faster over the last decade than road safety for the rest of the population. This applies to fatalities as well as serious injuries. Between 2006 and 2016, approximately 8,100 children lost their lives on the roads of the EU, compared to 593 in 2017. Almost one-sixth were in France alone, with 103 fatalities.
Approximately half the children killed in traffic accidents every year in the EU are vehicle occupants. In 2015, four percent of the 2,065 cyclists fatally injured in the EU were children under the age of 14. This rate varies among EU countries. In Sweden, no child in this age group died while riding a bicycle; in Germany five percent out of a total of 383 cyclists killed were children, in the Netherlands it was nine percent out of a total of 107, and in Hungary 15 percent out of a total of 34. Approximately 30 percent of children fatally injured were pedestrians; of the 5,516 pedestrians in the EU that were fatally injured in 2015, four percent were children.
Overall, according to the EU CARE database, children under the age of 15 had the lowest fatality rates compared to all other age groups. Between 2006 and 2015, fatality rates decreased in almost all age groups. The age groups 5 to 9 and 10 to 14 recorded the greatest decreases. Between 2006 and 2016, the annual average reduction in child mortality from road accidents in the EU was 7.3 percent, compared to 5.8 percent for the other age groups. The number of children killed in road traffic in the EU during this period was approximately 2.5 percent of total traffic fatalities and approximately six percent of all serious traffic accidents in the EU, while children accounted for more than one sixth of the population.