The 2015 Annual Report on Road Safety has been prepared by the International Traffic Safety Data and Analysis Group (IRTAD) and is based on data included in the IRTAD Database. The International Traffic Safety Data and Analysis Group (IRTAD) is a permanent working group of the Joint Transport Research Centre of the OECD and the International Transport Forum. It is composed of road safety experts and statisticians from renowned safety research institutes, national road and transport administrations, international organisations, universities, automobile associations, the automobile industry, etc. Currently, more than 70 organisations from 38 OECD and non-OECD countries are members of IRTAD (see list of members at the end of the report). Its main objectives are to contribute to international co-operation on safety data and its analysis. Its key outputs are the IRTAD Database and its annual report on road safety performance. It also conducts regular research and analysis on topics related to safety data analysis (e.g. forecasting, relationship between speed and crash risks, road safety and economic developments). The IRTAD Database includes aggregated data on injury accidents, road fatalities, injured and hospitalised road users, as well as relevant exposure data, in relation to factors such as population, motor vehicle fleet, road network length, vehicle-kilometres and seatbelt wearing rates covering every year since 1970. The ambition of IRTAD is to include new countries and to build and maintain a high-quality database on road safety information. IRTAD offers a mechanism for the integration of prospective member countries while assisting with improvement of road safety data collection systems, where needed. The IRTAD Group co-operate with a number of partners such as the World Bank’s Global Road Safety Facility, the Interamerican Development Bank, the FIA and the FIA Foundation for the Automobile and Society, to involve low and middle-income countries in the work of the Group. The IRTAD Database currently includes “validated” data from 32 countries. Six additional countries also provide data and the validation process by the IRTAD Group is on-going. Summary tables and figures of Chapter 1 only include “validated” data. Data on serious injuries are being progressively included in the IRTAD Database and are presented in this report when available. The section on “Data collection process” in chapters 2 to 39 pays particular attention on how countries collect and compile information on serious injuries and about the linking process between police and heath data. Injury severity should be defined based on medical diagnosis (and not solely on police reports). The IRTAD Group recommends to assess injury severity on the basis of the Abbreviated Injury Scale (AIS) and a serious injury should be defined as one with a Maximum AIS score of 3 or more (MAIS 3+). The International Classification of Diseases and related Health Problems (ICD) is published by the World Health Organization. It provides codes to classify diseases as well as signs, symptoms and external causes of injury or disease. Every health condition can be assigned to a unique category and given a code, of up to six characters. In addition to enabling the storage and retrieval of diagnostic information for clinical, epidemiological and quality purposes, these records also provide the basis for the compilation of national mortality and morbidity statistics by WHO member states. The ICD is revised periodically and is currently in its tenth edition (ICD 10). The 9th edition is still widely used (ICD9). Causes of accidents are classified. Traffic injuries have a specific code in the section “external cause”, as well as codes to describe the injury. The Abbreviated Injury Scale (AIS) — published by the Association for the Advancement of Automotive Medicine — is an internationally agreed tool to describe the severity of injury for each of nine regions of the body: 1 Minor, 2 Moderate, 3 Serious, 4 Severe, 5 Critical, 6 Unsurvivable. It is possible to convert ICD9 or 10 codes into AIS. Maximum Abbreviated Injury Scale (MAIS) is the maximum of the AIS scores for each region of the body. It is used to assess the overall severity of various injuries. To measure road safety performance and compare safety level across countries, three indicators are commonly used: the number of fatalities per head of population (mortality rate) the number of fatalities per distance travelled by motorised vehicles (vehicle-kilometres) (fatality risk) the number of fatalities per registered motorised vehicles. Each indicator has pros and cons and in all cases, country comparisons should be interpreted with greatest care, especially between countries with different level of motorisation. Fatalities per 100 000 inhabitants The number of inhabitants is the denominator most often used, as the figure is readily available in most countries. This rate expresses the mortality rate, or an overall risk of being killed in traffic, for the average citizen. It can be compared with other causes of death, like heart disease, HIV/Aids, etc. It is useful to compare risk in countries with comparable levels of motorisation. It is, however, not very meaningful to compare safety levels between high-motorised countries and countries where the level of motorisation is low. Fatalities per billion vehicle—kilometres; This indicator describes the safety quality of road traffic and theoretically the best indicator to assess the level of risk of the road network. This indicator does not take into account non-motorised vehicles (such as bicycles), which can in some countries represent a large part of the vehicle fleet and of the fatality figures. Only a limited number of countries collect data on distance travelled. Fatalities per 10 000 registered (motorised) vehicles; This rate can be seen as an alternative to the previous indicator, although it differs in that the annual distance travelled is unknown. This indicator can therefore only be used to compare the safety performance between countries with similar traffic and car-use characteristics. It requires reliable statistics on the number of vehicles. In some countries, scrapped vehicles are not systematically removed from the registration database, thereby undermining accuracy. This indicator does not take into account non-motorised vehicles (such as bicycles), which can in some countries represent a large part of the vehicle fleet and of the fatality figures. This report contains 39 chapters. Chapter 1 presents an overview of main road safety trends in IRTAD countries in 2013 and 2014. It also lists the current national road safety strategies and legislation in place regarding drinking and driving, speed limits and the use of seat belt and helmet. Chapters 2 to 39 present detailed country reports for the 38 IRTAD member and observer countries, focusing on data collection process, most recent safety data, road safety performance by user group, age group and road type and recent trends in road safety behaviour. It also describes national road safety strategies and targets and progress towards these targets. (Author/publisher)
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