Venezuela has a high road fatality rate

New research identifies Venezuela as having the most dangerous roads in Latin America. This comes from a study by the 5186 University of Michigan (UM), which shows Venezuela to have the highest risk of car crash fatalities for a Latin American country, according to a report by Business News Americas. The study showed that Venezuela has 35 road deaths/100,000 population. The Dominican Republic has 32 road deaths/100,000 population, El Salvador has 29/100,000, Brazil has 22/100,000, Paraguay has 20/100,000, Ecuador has 19/100,000, Costa Rica has 18/100,000, Colombia 17/100,000, Panama has 16/100,000, and Bolivia has 14/100,000.

The study also evaluated fatalities from road crashes as a percentage of all causes of death and found that Venezuela led Latin America with 7.3%, followed by Dominican Republic 4.9%, Paraguay 4.5%, El Salvador 4.1%, Costa Rica 4.1%, Ecuador 3.7%, Colombia 3.7%, Brazil 3.5%, Panama 3.4%, and Bolivia 2.1%.

The study was led by the Transportation Research Institute of UM and based the findings on data provided by the 3263 World Health Organisation (WHO). Worldwide, data from WHO has shown Namibia to have the world’s most dangerous roads with 45 deaths/100,000, while Iran and Thailand also performed poorly. It is worth noting too that Nambia has the second lowest population density of any nation in the world (after Mongolia), which suggests that vehicle congestion is not the cause of the country’s high road fatality rate and that other factors such as drink driving may be the source of the problem. However the WHO data depends heavily on reported deaths and it is well known that many countries do not have effective or efficient means for recording road deaths. The true scale of the death rate may be considerably worse in some countries.