Compared to the official numbers of road deaths reported by other European countries, the real number of road deaths in the Netherlands in 2022 ranked fifteenth in Europe [11]. [i] Correction was made for the size of each country, not by comparing the number of casualties, but by comparing traffic mortality (road deaths per inhabitant). In relation to road safety improvement measured in terms of the decrease in the number of road deaths per country in 2022 as contrasted to 2012, the Netherlands rank 30th, - the third-to-last - with an increase of 13%. In comparison, the best performing countries such as Lithuania, Poland and Estonia achieved a 43% or higher reduction in road deaths during the same period.
In its database CARE, the EU collects the information from road crash registrations of the 27 EU member states, as well as some other countries such as Norway and Switzerland. In CARE, no correction is made for the underregistration of road deaths in the road crash registrations of the member states (BRON for the Netherlands). For traffic mortality based on CARE, the Netherlands ranks fifth within the EU based on 2021 data [12] and ninth if other European countries such as Liechtenstein, Norway, Switzerland and Iceland are included in the comparison [13]. These comparisons provide a distorted picture, as they do not include the 13% road deaths that were missing from BRON but were identified by Statistics Netherlands. In 2018, ETSC investigated whether other countries also use more than one source when determining the number of road deaths [14]. About half (17 of the 32) countries surveyed use hospital data, cause-of-death statements, or non-natural death data. The completeness of road crash records across countries is currently unknown.
SWOV fact sheet Dutch road safety in an international perspective compares Dutch road safety performance to that of other countries in a broader sense.
[i] Based on preliminary figures from Statistics Netherlands.
