Brussels, 10 October 2024
In 2023, 20,400 people lost their lives in road crashes across the EU, marking a 1% decrease from the previous year, with 46 road deaths per million inhabitants. Although the longer-term trend shows a 10% reduction compared to 2019, the current rate of decrease falls short of the EU’s intermediate goal to halve road death and serious injuries by 2030, which requires a 4.5% annual reduction.
Progress continues to be very uneven between Member States, with Czechia, Cyprus, Poland, Romania and Finland registering their lowest figures since modern records began. Poland reported a 35% drop in the number of fatalities between 2019 and 2023 while Ireland reported an increase of 32%. The overall ranking of countries’ fatality rates has not changed significantly: Sweden and Denmark continue to have the safest roads, with 22 and 26 deaths per million inhabitants, respectively, while Bulgaria and Romania – despite improvements – reported the highest rates with respectively 82 and 81 fatalities per million inhabitants in 2023.
Currently, every week, around 400 people die in road crashes on the European roads. The EU is working towards ‘vision zero’, or the objective of eliminating road deaths and serious injuries by 2050. While the Commission has been a strong driver of action on the EU level, achieving this goal requires cooperative action on national and local level as well. Annual road deaths almost halved between 2001 and 2010, but progress has been slowing down since the early 2010s.
The figures published today are the definitive road fatality count for 2023, following the release of preliminary data in March 2024. Preliminary figures for the first half of 2024 indicate that the number of deaths on EU roads has remained stable, compared to the same period in 2023.
More information is available here.