Some 18,500 children have been killed in road collisions over the past ten years in the EU-27, around 1,200 of them in 2007 alone. At least half of those deaths, 600, could have been avoided, had the level of child road safety been the same across Europe as in Sweden. These and other results from the latest ETSC PIN country ranking on child road safety have been released. In the past, EU legislation, including the Directive on seat belts and child safety restraints has played a key role in improving child safety. New measures such as the “Intelligent Transport Systems” Action Plan may further contribute. Road safety of children has improved considerably in all 30 countries covered by PIN over the past decade. Portugal achieved the best annual average reduction in child road mortality of 15%. France, Slovenia, Switzerland, Ireland and Belgium also rank highly with reductions close to 10%. Lithuania, Sweden, Germany, Norway, Slovakia, Finland, Denmark and the Netherlands follow with better than average reductions. However, Bulgaria, Hungary, Italy, Czech Republic, Greece and Romania performed poorly with average annual reductions of less than 5%. As a result of this uneven rate of improvement, disparities between countries remain strikingly high: children in Lithuania have a 7 times higher probability of being killed in road traffic than children in Sweden, the best performing country in terms of road mortality of children. Another comparison shows that, while on average in the EU every tenth child death after the first birthday results from a road collision, this share varies from 5% in Norway and Sweden, to almost 20% in Luxembourg and Slovenia. Still European children fare better than the rest of the EU population. There are 16 road-related child deaths per million inhabitants, compared to 95 for the rest of the population. Also the annual average reduction in child road mortality in the EU-27 over the past decade was 7%, compared to 4.3% for the rest of the population. However, in Italy, Greece and Hungary, the opposite is true and road safety of the population aged 15 and above has improved faster than road safety of children. (Author/publisher)
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