It's not all endless sunshine

[Kate]

I bumped (no pun intended ) into an acquaintance yesterday who said her neighbour had an accident this weekend. No one seriously hurt but he was hit by a driver (with whole family in car) who had been driving for 12 hours non stop. Lots of tired people arriving on vacances!

[martyn94]

There are a number of ways of analysing road safety on an annual basis. Two of the most common are accidents per kilometers travelled and accidents as a percentage of the population. Using the latter method the most recent figures show that in France there are 53.5 deaths per million, the UK 28.7. Switzerland is currently the best European performer with 25.9 deaths per million. Interestingly the figure for the USA is 107!

Gus

So what are the relative figures in deaths per km? I ask because you have obviously got these figures at your fingertips, but seem to have chosen the less apposite one.

[martyn94]

I bumped (no pun intended ) into an acquaintance yesterday who said her neighbour had an accident this weekend. No one seriously hurt but he was hit by a driver (with whole family in car) who had been driving for 12 hours non stop. Lots of tired people arriving on vacances!

A friend of mine used to take his pet rabbits with him, plus a couple of knocked-down hutches (as well as the family, obviously). And for at least 12 hours. It must have got quite "close" towards the end. I guess it's not easy to find boarding kennels for rabbits.

[Allan]

There are a number of ways of analysing road safety on an annual basis. Two of the most common are accidents per kilometers travelled and accidents as a percentage of the population. Using the latter method the most recent figures show that in France there are 53.5 deaths per million, the UK 28.7. Switzerland is currently the best European performer with 25.9 deaths per million. Interestingly the figure for the USA is 107!

Gus

So what are the relative figures in deaths per km? I ask because you have obviously got these figures at your fingertips, but seem to have chosen the less apposite one.

Wikipedia is your friend https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of ... death_rate

[Gus Morris]

The site https://ec.europa.eu/transport/road_saf ... tistics_en provides some interesting data.

I saw an interview on French TV a couple of days back where a road safety campaigner said what many people are thinking. In France we have, on average, ten deaths on our roads every day. If we had ten people killed every day by terrorists the public outcry would be deafening.

Gus

[martyn94]

The site https://ec.europa.eu/transport/road_saf ... tistics_en provides some interesting data.

I saw an interview on French TV a couple of days back where a road safety campaigner said what many people are thinking. In France we have, on average, ten deaths on our roads every day. If we had ten people killed every day by terrorists the public outcry would be deafening.

Gus

But you could take the view that the glass is half full rather than half empty. On this weekend of all weekends, millions of motorists covered hundreds of millions of miles, and almost all of them survived it, and got somewhere that their family will enjoy, or got home.
A vastly higher proportion than when I first drove in France. Of course any death is too many, though quite a few road deaths seem to be a rather crude sort of natural selection. And I suppose a few people were clumsy enough to fall off ladders.