Controversy Pere Navarro: "Eliminating the 20 km/h to overtake will make it easier to put more speed cameras on the stage"
Reform The new regulations and fines of the DGT that are already in force
If we looked at the absolute numbers, it might even give some hesitation to move around
Catalonia, Madrid and Andalusia.
These three Autonomous Communities alone concentrated 60% of the traffic accidents with victims
that occurred in Spain between 2008 and 2019.
But things change radically if the figures are relativized.
And so, with a rate of 6.4 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants,
Galicia turns out to be the region where there is a higher risk of dying in an accident.
It is followed by La Rioja (5.9) and Castilla y León (5.8).
At the opposite extreme, in Madrid there are only 2.2 victims
per 100,000 inhabitants.
In the Canary Islands, they are 2.8.
The national average is 4.2.
Almost 1.2 million accidents
These are some of the results of the
study carried out by Fundación Mutua Madrileña and Fundación Gaspar Casal
for the period 2008-2019.
A dozen years in which there were 1.12 million accidents with victims (minor, serious and fatal), involving two million vehicles and 159,134 pedestrians.
The total number of deceased is frightening: 24,447 according to the DGT, more than 25,000 if it is the INE, as if we had erased an average population from the map.
If we analyze the evolution,
that number was reduced by 43% in the period,
although the researchers remember that the bulk of the improvements were only maintained until 2012. And they put on the table an apparent contradiction:
the decrease was accompanied by an increase in 11.7% in the number of accidents.
The reasons?
The greater security measures of the vehicles and, above all, that the increase in accidents occurred among urban ones, which rose by a third, but are less harmful.
Those on the road, the most dangerous, fell by 14.7%.
It is no longer the great danger among the young
The movement has caused
the percentage of deaths in the city to rise 10 points, to 30%.
Also noteworthy are vulnerable users, who are not protected by a bodywork: pedestrians, motorcyclists, cyclists and scooter drivers.
In 2019 there were already more than half of the total number of victims,
with special concern for motorcyclists.
Since 2014, their figures have worsened by 43% and they are already one in four victims.
The death toll among those over 85 also rose.
In contrast, the accident rate in the 15 to 34-year-old group (25.5% of the total) was reduced by almost half.
So,
if traffic was the number one cause of death for these young people in 2008, it is now…suicides.
66,500 million cost
On the contrary, there are almost immovable traits.
Like the masculinization of the victims.
Men are three quarters of those killed and injured,
despite women drivers already accounting for 42% of the total.
"One explanation could be an attitude of
greater caution and their lower propensity for risk"
point out the authors of the work.
These have wanted to go beyond the human dimension.
And so, they conclude that this pandemic caused
875,000 years of potential life to be lost,
among which those who died or needed the injured to recover, if they did so at all, will not enjoy it.
Translated into euros,
a social cost of 66,483 million,
equivalent to 0.5% of annual GDP in the 2008-2019 period.
Obviously, the annual figures for this cost have been reduced as the number of deaths has decreased.
And
from 7,800 million euros in the first year of the study, it fell to 5,400 million in the last one.
Conforms to The Trust Project criteria
Know more
Traffic
traffic accidents
DGT