Regional Analyses

4.3 Asia and the Pacific

On a regional basis, road deaths take the greatest toll on the Asia and Pacific region where 44 per cent of the world’s road deaths occur and only 16 per cent of the total motor vehicles are found. Current data was available on all of the Asian countries but only a few of the Pacific countries.

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) financed a large-scale regional road safety review in 1996. Much of the findings shown below are summarised from the study’s ‘Road Safety Guidelines for the Asian and Pacific Region’ as well as the report on ‘Vulnerable Road Users in the Asian and Pacific Region’ (ADB, 1998). The study used the sub-regions of newly industrialised economies (NIEs), Central Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, Central Asian Republics and Pacific Developing Member Countries (PDMC).

The analysis here is based on official statistics. As stressed in Chapter 2, the under-reporting of road fatalities is intensive and several of the documented cases came from the Asia and the Pacific Region. For instance, the actual number of China’s road deaths has been estimated by the official Beijing Traffic Engineering Research Institute to be over 40 per cent greater than that reported in official statistics. Such discrepancies in data need to be re-emphasised here as it is quite likely that the actual current situation is much worse than that being reported and acknowledged.

4.3.1 Current situation

From Table 16 it can be seen that China and India dominate the region (and in fact lead the world) in terms of road deaths. The more motorised countries, Thailand, Korea and Malaysia all lose a larger share of their citizens to road deaths with a fatality risk approximately 5 times that of China and India. Bangladesh with the lowest motorisation level, almost one hundredth that of Malaysia has the lowest fatality risk but the worst fatality rate of the region. Malaysia is reported to have the highest fatality risk in the world. Fatality risks and rates for the Asia/Pacific region are presented in Figures 6 and 7.

Table 16  - Key indicators for the Asia and the Pacific region

Figure 6  -Asia/Pacific fatality risk (1996)

Figure 7  - Asia/Pacific fatality rates (1996)

4.3.2 Recent trends

Major changes have taken place in the Asia Region within the last few years. Motorisation has increased at a rapid rate, largely with the growth in motorcycles. The number of motor vehicles almost trebled in China and more than doubled in the other large Asian countries in less than a decade.

Population growth was maintained to less than 10 percent for China, almost half that elsewhere in the region while road deaths increased by 40 per cent in China as in the other nine Asian countries. Accordingly, the personal risk of being killed in a road crash has more than quadrupled in China and more than doubled in the other nine Asian countries.

4.3.3 Road crash casualties

Road user type

The following table examines the involvement of vulnerable road users, i.e. pedestrians, cyclists, and As shown in Table 19 and as could be expected, the young and the elderly had a higher fatality involvement than with injuries but the vast majority of pedestrian casualties occurred to the economically active cohort (21-60 years).  motorcyclists, etc. in different Asian countries. The highest percentages of pedestrian deaths (of the total) were found in Hong Kong (67 per cent), Korea and Sri Lanka (48 and45 per cent respectively). Conversely, the percentage of pedestrian deaths in Thailand and PR China were particularly low, and even cyclist/non motorised vehicle (NMV) fatalities were reported to be low in China.

Table 17  - Percentage crash distribution by Vulnerable Road User (VRU) type

All VRU Pedestrian NMV Motorcycle

4.3.3.1 Gender and age distribution

Female road casualty involvement was relatively high in the region with Taiwan reporting the highest of all LMCs. Bhutan also had a surprisingly large female road casualty share (See Table 18).

Table 18 - Casualty distribution by gender (1993)

Table 19 -  Age distribution for pedestrian casualties