Road accidents in Finland and Sweden: A comparison of associated factors

We updated some general road-safety comparisons between Finland and the best performing European countries safety-wise: Sweden, the UK and the Netherlands (SUN countries). The main conclusions were that (i) there is a substantial safety potential for Finland, and (ii) Sweden is the number one choice among the SUN countries for safety comparison with Finland, to define more specific aspects of the safety potential. Comparison of the number of fatalities per population between Finland and Sweden showed that for Finland, there is a safety potential of 99 yearly fatalities. Two thirds of the potential is on public roads and one third on non-public roads, mainly streets. The highest potential for fatality reduction is for cars, related mainly to head-on and single vehicle fatalities. In contrast to traditional analyses of age and gender of the killed car drivers, we examined age and gender of all the car drivers involved in fatal accidents as car driver. As suggested by the population risks, Finland has a safety potential especially for young (70 years) male car drivers. One of our main conclusions is that advanced use of disaggregated data provides more options than programmes created for analysing e.g. European-wide accident data. Additionally, we suggested improvements to the compared datasets related to recording of suicides and severity of the injuries as well as contents and validation of the data. We recommend further comparison studies related to severity of the injuries and different traffic environments.