Data available about submerged vehicle crashes in the Netherlands provide information about a number of characteristics, such as vehicle category, and casualties’ age and gender. Unfortunately, further breakdown of the data is impossible.
Vehicle category
Between 2010 and 2019, submerged vehicle crashes mainly affected car occupants (Figure 2), but cyclists and mobility scooter users were also frequent casualties.
Figure 2. Modes of transport of all road deaths in submerged vehicle crashes in 2010-2019. Note: the categories pedelec, microcar and other/unknown were not provided by Statistics Netherlands because of recognisability; the number of casualties in these categories amounted to less than 10. Source: Statistics Netherlands, edited by SWOV.
Age
Figure 3 shows that casualties were particularly numerous among 18-24-year olds.
Figure 3. Ages of all road deaths in submerged vehicle crashes in 2010-2019. Note: age group 12-17 comprises fewer than 10 fatalities whose data were not provided because of recognisability. Source: Statistics Netherlands, edited by SWOV.
Gender
Male fatalities of submerged vehicle crashes are overrepresented. Statistics Netherlands data show that, between 2010 and 2019, 407 men and 124 women died in a submerged vehicle crash in the Netherlands (Figure 4).
Figure 4. Gender of road deaths in submerged vehicle crashes in 2010-2019. Source: Statistics Netherlands, edited by SWOV.
Stjernbrandt et al. [2] found that, in Sweden, 69% of fatalities were male, among which 78% were male drivers. Female fatalities more often concerned passengers: 54% of them are women, 18% men [2]. These figures can mostly be explained by male and female traffic exposure. In the Netherlands, men drove a daily average of 28 kilometres while women drove 22 kilometres. What is more, women are passengers twice as often as men [5]. The gender split in submerged vehicle crashes therefore corresponds to that of the total number of road deaths in the Netherlands.
