Regional Analyses

4.4 Central and Eastern Europe

The CEE Region accounts for 12 per cent of the world’s fatalities, almost twice its share of population or motor vehicles (6-7%). In terms of the number of fatalities per person, it has one of the worst personal safety record of all the regions. While current crash and casualty data was readily available for the region, trend data is difficult to collect on many countries and discrepancies, especially with motor vehicles, are frequent.

The European Union recently funded a Phare Multi-Country Road Safety Project that reviewed the road safety situation in 13 countries. Crash data and sector activity was analysed as with the donor-funded reviews in Asia and the Pacific and the Latin America and the Caribbean studies. The summary below is based on the PHARE project findings.

4.4.1 Current situation

The ten countries summarised below account for about 87 percent of the regional population. Russia clearly dominates the fatality situation with both half of the region’s fatalities and also the highest fatality risk. Russia’s per capita risk of dying in a road crash is over three times that of the Ukraine’s (See table 20). Figures 9 and 10 shows the fatality risks and rates for all CEE countries with data available.

Motorisation ranges widely in the region with the Czech Republic reporting near one vehicle for every two people, almost ten times that of Azerbaijan.

Table 20 - Key indicators for Central and Eastern Europe

4.4.2 Recent trends

Trend data were available for very few countries and these did not include Russia. The recent experience of Poland is compared with that of Azerbaijan, Lithuania, Bulgaria and Croatia in the figure below. Quite different experiences were reported with road fatalities rising by almost a third in Poland while they were to have decreased by over a third in the other countries. Population changed little with Poland reporting no change at all over the 8 year period. Motorisation increased much faster in Poland while in the other countries, where fatalities had decreased, the number of motor vehicles rose by less than 1 per cent per annum

Figure 9 - Central/Eastern Europe fatality risk (1996)

Figure 10  - Central/Eastern Europe fatality rates (1996)

4.4.3 Road crash casualties

4.4.3.1 Road user type

The Phare Study reported the overall pedestrian involvement for Eastern European countries for which data was available at 30 per cent. Some countries had a much higher pedestrian involvement rate, including 50 per cent in Romania and Kazakhstan and 60 per cent in Albania. Bus crashes were much less common (i.e. similar to that in HMCs) with only 1-2 percent of crashes in Estonia, Latvia and Slovenia (Phare, 1998).

4.4.3.2 Gender and age distribution

Females accounted for 1 out of every three to four road casualties in the region (See Table 21). Not surprisingly, the countries with higher level of motorisation reported more female involvement in road casualties. Females represented more casualties than fatalities.

Table 21  -Casualty distribution by gender

There was less of an identifiable regional pattern with the age distribution of road casualties. Poland reported an exceptionally low rate of children involvement while Estonia and Latvia appeared to have a high proportion of child casualties. Working age adults (between the age of 19and 59) accounted for between two-thirds to three quarters of all road casualties. The age cohort experiencing the largest number of casualties was the 30-49 year olds (See Table 22) with all five countries reporting a minimum of one quarter of all casualties from this age group.

Table 22  - Casualty distribution by age