Introduction - The Community database on Accidents on the Roads in Europe (CARE)
Road traffic accidents in the Member States of the European Union annually claim about 36.000 lives and leave more than 1.7 million people injured, representing estimated costs of 160 billion euro. Since 1984, a large number of measures to reduce road accidents have been taken at the Community level. Along with these measures, the Council adopted a Decision on 30 November 1993 on the creation of a Community database on road accidents (93/704/EC), the CARE project.
It was commonly agreed that such a database at the Community level would make it possible to identify and quantify road safety problems, evaluate the efficiency of road safety measures, determine the relevance of Community actions and facilitate the exchange of experience in this field. After a pilot phase of about 3 years, the Council endorsed the “Report from the Commission on the progress with the project and its future prospects” (COM(97) 238 final).
CARE is a Community database on road accidents resulting in death or injury (no statistics on damage only accidents). The major difference between CARE and most other existing international databases is the high level of disaggregation, i.e. CARE is based on detailed data of individual accidents as collected by the Member States. This structure allows for maximum flexibility and potential with regard to analyzing the information contained in the system and opens up a whole set of new possibilities in the field of accident analysis.
National data sets are integrated into the CARE database in their original national structure and definitions, with confidential data blanked out. However, transformation rules are implemented in the CARE database in order to increase data compatibility and thus enhance the functioning of the system.
The process of improving “homogenization” of accident data within CARE is underway. In the meantime, the inherent incompatibility of national accident data remains a source of possible misinterpretation when performing comparative analyses at international level. Therefore, on-line access to the CARE database is currently restricted to expert users. The summary statistical tables contained here provide an overview of EU road accident data.
