THE ANALYSIS OF CHANGES IN MORTALITY IN TRAFFIC IN THE EUROPEAN UNION COUNTRIES IN THE PERIOD 1991-2011

Abstract

The article presents the results of time-space analysis of selected aspects of road safety in the European Union countries. The study horizon covered years 1991-2011. Data for the analysis were obtained from the databases of Eurostat and related to the number of accidents and the number of people killed and injured in road accidents. The raw values of these attributes were converted into intensity rates against the number of inhabitants. The rest of the work presents in a graphical form the rankings of EU countries according to road safety in 2011 based on the rate of accidents, injuries and the killed in terms of the number of inhabitants. Since the rankings were characterized by a very low similarity of results, it was made a critical assessment of the reliability of data on the number of accidents and the number of people injured published by EUROSTAT. In particular, it was shown that these data are not comparable and cannot be the subject of thorough international analysis. The reason for this fact are significant differences in the definition of persons injured and hence the accident. We can draw an important conclusion that all international comparisons must be based on the index number of people killed in road accidents. Taking into account the temporal aspect of the studied phenomenon, for each country it was determined the direction and rate of change indicator of the killed in accidents in the years 1991-2011 using the linear trend models. In a more detail way it was analyzed the level of road safety in Poland and neighboring countries - Germany, Slovakia , the Czech Republic and Lithuania.

Keywords

• road safety, time-space analysis, ratings