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Road Deaths

Map No. 243

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In 2001 there were 984 thousand deaths caused by road traffic accidents worldwide. Half of these deaths occurred in the regions of Eastern and Southern Asia. The highest road deaths per person, however, were in South America. The lowest rates of road deaths were in Northern Africa and Japan.

In 2002 there were 29 million kilometres of road in the world. On average each year, on every 30 kilometres of road - someone dies in a traffic accident. Some places have a concentration of accidents: the world’s most dangerous road, in Bolivia, is 70 kilometres long and approximately 100 people die there every year.

"Perhaps when we reach the point where individuals are valued and life is respected, then behaviour and habits will change for the better ..." Kofi Kyeremeh, 2003

Territory size shows the proportion of all road traffic accident deaths worldwide that occurred there.

• Open PDF poster, designed for printing. You need Acrobat Reader.
• View labelled territory map or population map for comparison
• Data files: Excel (large with map), Excel (small no map), Opendoc format (see notes)
• Technical notes for this data.
• High Resolution image (see copyright conditions)
• All of the data we use is estimated; see data page