Europe

Home page

Europe

About 20,000 people were killed in road crashes last year in EU

28 March 2022 15:44 (UTC +04:00)

Today the European Commission published preliminary figures on road fatalities for 2021, APA reports citing the EU website.

An estimated 19 800 people were killed in road crashes last year. This was an increase of 1 000 deaths (+5%) on 2020, but still represents almost 3 000 (-13%) fewer fatalities compared to the pre-pandemic period in 2019. The overall target is to halve the number of deaths by 2030. EU-wide, the last decade saw a fall of 36%.

Commissioner for Transport Adina Vălean said: “As traffic levels return to normality, we must ensure that we don't return to pre-pandemic numbers of deaths on our roads. At the EU level we will endeavour through financing, legislation and outreach to help deliver the ‘safe system' of safer infrastructure, safer vehicles, safer road use and better post-crash care. But this is a shared responsibility with Member States, the industry and road users. Every death and serious injury on our roads is avoidable.”

EU-wide, road deaths in 2021 rose by 5% on the previous year, although comparisons with 2020 are strongly influenced by the traffic level patterns in each country during the course of the pandemic. Between 2019 and 2020, the number of road fatalities fell by 17%.

The overall ranking1 of countries' fatality rates has not changed significantly with the safest roads being found in Sweden (18 deaths per one million inhabitants) while Romania (93/million) reported the highest rate in 2021. The EU average was 44 road deaths per million inhabitants.

Based on preliminary figures, nine Member States (Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Cyprus, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Portugal and Sweden) registered their lowest ever number of road fatalities in 2021.

Comparing with the pre-pandemic year 2019, road deaths in 2021 fell by 13% with the largest decreases of more than 20% occurring in Denmark, Belgium, Portugal, Poland, and Lithuania. In contrast, over the last two years Latvia, Slovenia and Finland experienced increases in the number of road fatalities.