Over the last decade the death toll on Spanish roads has fallen by 57.5%. and the total has fallen for the seventh year running.
Although 2010 registered the lowest fall in road traffic deaths the downward trend has continued and last year 173 less people died than in 2009.
In 2001 the number of people killed on national roads exceeded 4,000 and the EU set Spain the objective of cutting the death toll by 50% over 10 years. Spain has more than complied with this requisite and now stands ninth lowest in the European league table of road deaths. The UK leads the table with registering 38 road deaths per million inhabitants last year. Currently statistics for Spain stand at 59 deaths per million inhabitants.
In 2009 there were 1,903 deaths on the roads and in 2010 1,730 deaths were registered. The Minister of the Interior compared this year’s slower descent to “dieting, firstly you lose a lot of weight and, when the treatment is more advanced, it costs more to lose less a few pounds.”
Following the introduction of the points system for driving licences and legal changes affecting driving offences the statistics for road deaths began to fall dramatically. The descent has continued over the last 10 years although this year the rate of the decrease slowed to 9.1%.
According to the Ministry of the Interior an average of 4.7 people died on the roads every day in 2009 compared to 5.2 in 2009 and six in 2008.
The first deaths of 2011 were, in the majority of cases, the result of “driving off the road” which also accounted for the majority of road deaths last year. The second cause by percentage of road deaths was frontal collisions and thirdly lateral or rear collisions. According to the Ministry all three accidents involve the same element: high speed.
