Since the seventies, the safety of car occupants has greatly improved, both expressed in the number of road deaths and in mortality risk. The blue line in Figure 1 shows how many annual road deaths among car occupants were registered between 1950 and 2020.[i] From the fifties to the early seventies, the number of road deaths increased, peaking to 1358 in 1973. From 1976 to 2011 the number of road deaths decreased, while since 2011 the number of road deaths among car occupants no longer decreased. The red line in Figure 1 shows how mortality risk developed between 1990 and 2020.[ii] To measure mortality risk, we use the number of road deaths among occupants of Dutch and foreign cars per billion vehicle kilometres travelled in the Netherlands. Except for a peak in 1995, mortality risk decreased from 8.5 to 1.7 road deaths per billion kilometres between 1990 and 2014 and has, since then, increased to 2.3 road deaths per billion kilometres. Mortality risk was higher in 2020 than it had been in 2019.
Figure 1. The number of registered road deaths among car occupants (1950-2020 period), and mortality risk defined as the number of registered road deaths among car occupants per billion kilometres travelled (1990-2020 period). The numbers for 2018, 2019 and 2020 are provisional numbers. (Sources road deaths: 1950-1975 Statistics Netherlands, 1976-2003 Crash registration VOR, 2004-present Police-registered road deaths (BRON), latest update using BRON-2020, dated August 2021; source vehicle kilometres travelled: Statistics Netherlands [2])
[i] The number of registered road deaths is lower than the actual number of road deaths. See also SWOV fact sheet Road deaths in the Netherlands.
[ii] At the time of the composition of this fact sheet, no numbers of vehicle kilometres travelled between 1950 and 1989 were known. Statistics Netherlands designates the number of vehicle kilometres travelled in 2018, 2019 and 2020 as ‘provisional’, which implies that mortality risk in 2018, 2019 en 2020 should also be considered ‘provisional’.
