Road motor vehicles and road fatalities

The number of road motor vehicles is high and rising among OECD countries, and reducing road accidents is a concern in all countries. The tables in this section show the numbers of road motor vehicles per thousand inhabitants and two indicators of road safety – the number of road fatalities per million inhabitants and the number of road fatalities per million vehicles.

Definition

A road motor vehicle is a vehicle running on wheels and intended for use on roads with an engine providing its sole means of propulsion and which is normally used for carrying persons or goods or for drawing, on the road, vehicles used for the carriage of persons or goods. Thus buses, coaches, freight vehicles and motor cycles are included as well as passenger motor cars. Motor vehicles running on rails are excluded.

Road fatality means any person killed immediately or dying within 30 days as a result of a road accident.

Comparability

Road motor vehicles are attributed to the countries where they are registered while deaths are attributed to the countries in which they occur. As a result, ratios of fatalities to million inhabitants and of fatalities to million vehicles cannot strictly be interpreted as indicating the proportion of a country’s population that is at risk of suffering a fatal road accident or the likelihood of a vehicle registered in a given country being involved in a fatal accident. In practice, however, this is not considered to be a serious problem because discrepancies between the numerators and denominators tend to cancel out.

The numbers of vehicles entering the existing stock is usually accurate but information on the numbers of vehicles withdrawn from use is less certain.