Press release

26 April 2007

The report entitled The peak conquered; Road safety assessment in the Netherlands 1950-2005 presents the developments of the numbers of road deaths and in-patients. The factors that have influenced this are also discussed. The assessment is a time document that summarizes current knowledge about developments and effects. Therefore, it offers substantive points of departure for future road safety policy.

Trends in road safety
The trends that have occurred during the last 50 years are:

• the car has increasingly been dominating road safety;
• the death rate per kilometre travelled has fallen spectacularly, first by 8% a year, and by nearly 5% since 1985;
• he crash rate has decreased during the last decade, especially among the elderly;
• the number of pedestrian deaths has decreased strongly, especially among children;
• for years, the number of single vehicle car crashes, i.e. crashes not involving any other road users, has hardly decreased, whereas other crash types involving cars have decreased;
• the introduction and lowering of speed limits has had a positive road safety effect;
• roads have become safer, for instance by using facilities for pedestrians and cyclists;
• many advanced technical developments in vehicles which have been introduced during the last decades have improved road safety;
• people behave safer in traffic, driving skills have improved, among other things, because of improved police enforcement.

Developments in a half century's road safety visualised

These and other interesting trends in Dutch road safety have been demonstrated by SWOV's analysis of the numbers of road deaths and in-patients since 1950. Crash data has been subdivided by modal split, age, and other characteristics.

In addition to developments in numbers of casualties, this report discusses how crashes are registered and the registration rate, and looks at road safety definitions, road safety units, and social factors that influence, or have influenced, road safety.

The complete publication entitled The peak conquered; Road safety assessment in the Netherlands 1950-2005 has been available since 26th April 2007 at www.swov.nl. The publication is in Dutch, but has an English summary.