Urban population size and road traffic collisions in Europe.

Carmen Cabrera-Arnau,Steven R Bishop

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0256485

Abstract

Millions of road traffic collisions take place every year, leading to significant knock-on effects. Many of these traffic collisions take place in urban areas, where traffic levels can be elevated. Yet, little is known about the extent to which urban population size impacts road traffic collision rates. Here, we use urban scaling models to analyse geographic and road traffic collision data from over 300 European urban areas in order to study this issue. Our results show that there is no significant change in the number of road traffic collisions per person for urban areas of different sizes. However, we find individual urban locations with traffic collision rates which are remarkably high. These findings have the potential to inform policies for the allocation of resources to prevent road traffic collisions across the different cities.

Highlights

At a worldwide level, approximately every 24 seconds someone dies as a consequence of a road traffic collision [1]
We firstly propose the scaling hypothesis, which assumes that the number of road traffic collisions Y in a given urban area is determined by its population size X according to an urban scaling model of the form Y = αXβ
We conclude that urban population size has no significant effect on the number of road traffic collisions in urban areas from four European countries

Summary

Introduction

Approximately every 24 seconds someone dies as a consequence of a road traffic collision [1]. For people aged 5 to 55, road traffic collisions are among the ten most common causes of death [2]. In Great Britain it is estimated that the average cost of in the year 2019 is above £100k ($140k), for fatal traffic collisions, this figure could be as high as £2.2M ($3M) [3]. Road traffic collisions are not uniformly distributed across regions. Road traffic collision death rates in low- and middle-income countries are about twice as large as in high-income countries (21.5 and 19.5 vs 10.9 per 100,000 population) [1]. Road traffic collision fatality rates are higher in rural areas, but most traffic collisions take place in urban areas [4, 5]

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Results

Conclusion