Organisation: European Transport Safety Council (ETSC)
Date of Publication: March 2025
Uploaded to Knowledge Centre: 15 April 2025
Every day, all over Europe, people fall off bikes or trip on pavements and injure themselves.
While these incidents do not usually end in tragedy, the short-term effects can be extremely burdensome. Broken bones can require multiple x-rays, visits to specialist doctors, plaster casts, physiotherapy sessions, as well the supply and fitting of equipment such as boots and crutches. Days and weeks of work time are lost. Family and friends are needed to pick up the pieces. In a significant number of cases, the injury causes lifelong disability.
But these events often don’t appear in national road safety statistics. Nor are the locations of crashes reported to the authority responsible for that section of road. It’s as if they never officially happened.
Road injuries of all levels of severity often go unreported, particularly those involving a pedestrian or cyclist and no other vehicle, for the simple reason that the police are not called to the scene, and they are usually the authority responsible for recording the injuries and deaths that occur in road collisions. This approach is fundamentally flawed and leads to a misleading picture of the full burden of road injuries on individuals, societies and our economies.
Download the report using the link below: