A world where eight or nine jumbo jets filled with passengers crashed each day with no survivors seems unthinkable.
Yet such a situation roughly equates to the number of people – about 3,260 – who die on the world’s roads on an average day, based on figures from 2021.
This devastating toll, which works out at about 1.2 million deaths each year, has been called "the silent pandemic".
Road accidents are the biggest killer of young people globally, the World Health Organisation (WHO) says. In the UK, for example, they cause the deaths of about five people each day and result in 80 being seriously injured, indicate figures reported by Brake, an advocate for safer roads.
“If anything else came into our lives and was harming people at that rate, more change would be done,” says Luca Straker, Brake's campaign manager.
“The media quite often covers that a crash has happened in which people have been killed but it seems to just be part of our lives rather than something that shocks people. A lot of people seem to think it’s inevitable that crashes will happen on the road, whereas we believe that every single crash is preventable.”
The world is approaching the halfway point of the UN's Decade of Action for Road Safety, which set the target of halving road deaths between the start of 2021 and the end of 2030. In 2021, the global total was almost 1.2 million road deaths.
In the previous decade there had been a 5 per cent reduction in deaths despite significant growth in the number of vehicles.
Challenging targets
Prof Chris Cherry, who researches road safety at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, said the UN’s target, which demands much faster reductions in accident rates in the 2020s than were seen in the 2010s, will be hard to achieve.
“One of the real challenges with those sorts of goals is there’s not usually a specific one thing you can focus on,” Prof Cherry said.
“These are system failures that happen across many different agencies and institutions. Individuals have different levels of responsibility and what that’s historically allowed people to do is to deflect responsibility.”
Lucy Harrison, justice and outreach manager for RoadPeace, a charity that supports those involved in road crashes, said that even when someone is culpable "many in society still won't view this as a criminal act".
"Further, police investigate crashes from a position of finding out if someone is to blame but we don’t really investigate crashes from a point of looking at the cause."
She suggested the UK should go ahead with setting up the proposed Road Safety Investigation Branch, mirroring its Air Accidents Investigation Branch.
"A change in culture is desperately needed," Ms Harrison said. "We won’t truly tackle road death until every stakeholder understands it is preventable and unnecessary.
"Measures should be aimed at those who cause the most harm on our roads, instead of those who cause the least. Our politicians and leaders need to meet crash victims and hear their stories, and understand the horrendous ripple effect and life-long consequences that serious road crashes have."
According to the WHO, males are three times as likely to be killed in road accidents as females, while effects are felt most severely in low and middle-income countries, which have 60 per cent of the world’s vehicles but account for 92 per cent of road deaths.
A quarter of those killed were in four-wheeled vehicles, with 30 per cent motorcyclists, 21 per cent pedestrians, 5 per cent cyclists and 19 per cent in coaches, buses, lorries and other vehicles.
Beyond the horrific death toll, 20 million to 50 million people suffer non-fatal injuries in road crashes each year, with some permanently disabled.
Controlling speed is central to efforts to reduce road deaths, because when vehicles are travelling faster, accidents are more likely and often more severe. The stopping distance of a car travelling at 30mph is double that of one going at 20mph.
“We have a lot of engineering arrogance in our profession, that we’ll just build a better guardrail and that will solve all of our problems, but in reality there are so many things that can go wrong at speed and we can’t try to predict all of them,” Prof Cherry said.
Need for tighter control
To keep speeds down, limits must be strictly enforced, says Prof Stefan Bauernschuster, of the University of Passau in Germany.
“Telling people speeding is dangerous – and there are many deaths because of speeding – this is completely futile,” he said. “What helps is if people are afraid they will get caught: if you exceed the expected speed, you will be caught. They drive more carefully, this reduces accidents.”
Echoing this, Prof Cherry said cities that have done well in curbing the problem are mostly European ones that have focused on speed management.
“Some of that is enabled by automated enforcement schemes for red-light running, for speeding, [and] dramatically reducing speed limits in areas where there are any pedestrians,” he said.
“These 30kph roads are safe enough inherently that if a crash happens, it doesn’t result in deaths or at least seldom results in deaths.”
Efforts to lower speeds often face opposition, such as in Wales, where the introduction of a default 20mph limit in built-up areas in September 2023 was met with an opposing petition signed by half a million people.
However, in the first 12 months after the policy was introduced, the number of crashes fell by 26 per cent and the related death toll also dropped, as did injuries.
Ms Straker said speed limit reductions in urban areas encourage people to walk, reducing the number of vehicles on the road.
Numbers reduced in UAE
According to official figures, the death rate on the roads in the UAE, adjusted for population, fell by two thirds between 2010 and 2019.
Thomas Edelmann, founder and managing director of Road Safety UAE, credits the improvement with measures including better enforcement of traffic laws, such as through cameras to detect speeding, jumping red lights and whether someone is wearing a seat belt.
More modern vehicles with technology such as collision warning and prevention systems have played a role, as have improved emergency medical treatment and education campaigns, said Mr Edelmann.
He suggests further improvements, both in the UAE and globally, could come from more universal use of seat belts and efforts to tackle “distracted driving”, among other policies.
“The use of the mobile phone must be restricted, by education and by technology,” he said. “Start road safety education in kindergartens and schools to instil the right safety habits as early as possible.”
While he said full autonomous driving technology could help in the long term, currently it appears to be “far away” from implementation. Prof Cherry has a similar view.
“I’m sceptical that the technology will scale at a price point that’s competitive in a way that transforms our mobility system in a meaningful way,” he said.
As the world continues to grapple with the challenge of reducing road deaths, Ms Straker said halving the global rate was feasible “if robust, bold measures and changes happen” and the effects that road deaths have on families highlight the need for urgent action.
“It’s a horrific thing for anyone to have to go through,” Ms Straker said. "It’s indescribable pain these crashes cause."
