On March 8, 2024, the European Commission unveiled preliminary data concerning road accidents that took place in 2023 across the European Union, and the findings are grim: around 20,400 individuals lost their lives on European roads, a figure only one percent lower than that of the previous year. This minor decline signals that only a few countries are on track to meet the 2030 target of halving the number of deaths.
The data indicates that since 2019, the number of road fatalities has remained virtually unchanged in Spain, France, and Italy, while Ireland, Latvia, the Netherlands, Slovakia, and Sweden have seen an increase. On the other hand, over the last four years, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Hungary, and Poland are aligned with the objective of reducing deaths and serious injuries by fifty percent by 2030, although this is based on preliminary and often incomplete data. Italy recorded a rate of 52 deaths per million inhabitants in 2023, down from 54 the previous year.
Final figures for 2022 reveal that 52% of road fatalities occurred on rural roads, compared to 38% in urban areas and 9% on motorways. Cyclists represent the group of road users for whom there has not been a significant reduction in deaths over the past decade: more than two thousand cyclists died in 2022. According to the report, this is due to "a persistent lack of adequate infrastructure and unsafe behavior by all road users."
Furthermore, in 2022, heavy vehicles with a total mass exceeding 3.5 tons were involved in fatal accidents on non-urban roads, resulting in 415 fatalities. Notably, the majority of these deaths (178) were due to collisions involving heavy vehicles, and 159 occurred in accidents not involving other vehicles. In urban settings, heavy vehicles were involved in accidents leading to 37 deaths, 25 of which occurred in events not involving other vehicles.
