Some background information on the countries

Over the last thirty years, there have been a number of initiatives undertaken which were designed to reduce the number of persons killed in road accidents. For example, the introduction of legislation requiring people to wear seat belts or drink less alcohol before driving, and in recent years many countries have banned the use of mobile phones while driving.
Also, over this period of time, there have been some moves to harmonise traffic law across Europe. However, there are still large differences between countries in terms of road networks, traffic density and accident rates. There are also differences in safety related legislation and, importantly, how it is enforced. For example, there are sizeable differences in the legal limit for drink-driving and whether novice or professional drivers have a different limit, and how such laws are enforced with some countries regularly using breathalysers to test drivers, whether randomly, on suspicion, or after being involved in an accident.

There are also very marked differences between countries in the use of speed cameras to enforce speeding. Such differences have resulted in countries having a variety of road safety trends over the 5 years preceding the latest survey. In this respect, among those countries who participated in the last two SARTRE surveys, it is possible to identify three types of country:
— The first type, that includes Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia and Switzerland, has clearly improved in terms of road safety and as a result the number of fatalities has reduced.
— The second group has remained more or less stable. This group contains Belgium, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Although there has been some improvement in the number of fatalities in these countries, it is much less obvious than in the first group. However, a number of these countries, such as Finland, Sweden and the United Kingdom, already had a very good road safety record so that it would have been more difficult for them to have shown any additional improvement; nonetheless even these ‘safe’ countries are aiming for further improvements while road safety still needs further improvement in the remaining countries in this group.