How does Aotearoa New Zealand rate internationally on pedestrians killed in road crashes?
By LSA Executive Council member Bill Frith
To evaluate how well we’re doing here in Aotearoa New Zealand, our performance in various areas is often compared to those of other countries. For example, the Prime Minister has described the "shocking" state of maths achievement after "years of drift and decay" and announced a new primary school maths curriculum modelled on that of Singapore and Australia will be introduced in Term 1 next year.
However, we seldom hear anything about our place in the world in regards to road safety. Thankfully, the International Transport Forum (ITF) collects and compiles data that can be used to make this comparison (note that not all countries supply data to the ITF for all or any of the safety measures).
The graph below shows that in New Zealand pedestrian fatalities as a percentage of all road deaths is relatively low:
However, if we look at per capita road crash deaths (total road deaths per 100,000 people), things look a lot worse:
Of the 34 countries that provide data to the ITF, New Zealand has the fifth highest per capita road crash deaths, exceeded only by the United States, Costa Rica, Chile and Colombia. This means that although 7.9% of all road crash deaths are pedestrians, this is a relatively large absolute number when compared to other countries because the number of total road crash deaths per 100,000 in New Zealand is high.
So to get a better handle on how vulnerable pedestrians in New Zealand are to being killed in road crashes, we need to look at New Zealand’s per capita pedestrian deaths from road crashes:
This chart shows that New Zealand has fewer per capita pedestrian deaths than 50% of countries that supplied this data to ITF. This is a lot better than NZ’s road safety as a whole.
What about our recent progress? The following chart shows the percent decrease in per capita pedestrian fatalities for countries between 2013 and 2022:
This graph shows that there has been some decrease in pedestrian fatalities over this time. But NZ has made less progress than many other countries, where the percent decrease in pedestrian fatalities is higher.
What does this mean? New Zealand’s overall record for road crash deaths does not compare well internationally. Our pedestrian road crash deaths are better in comparison to other countries, but recently we have made only minimal progress. If we are to move meaningfully closer to a safe land transport system and to the goal of zero road deaths by 2050, we need to be doing more to make sure pedestrians and all road users are safe.
Acknowledgements
All the above data comes from the International Transport Forum, either directly or via the Australian Federal Government and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).