How safe are Malta’s roads?
A widely shared graph suggested that Maltese drivers are the safest around
Social media posts claiming that Maltese drivers are the safest in Europe were met with incredulity last week, with many struggling to tally the data being presented with their own experience of Malta’s roads.
The posts showed a graph taken from the website of ACEA, the European Automobile Association, an organisation bringing together 15 of Europe’s top vehicle manufacturers which describes itself as “the voice of the auto industry”.
The graph used data from the European Commission’s road safety database to compare the number of deaths on the road in 2011 and 2021. It showed that Malta had a ratio of 39 road fatalities per million people in 2011 but this dropped to just 17 a decade later, the lowest in the EU.
This, the posts argued, shows that Maltese drivers are the safest in Europe. But others retorted that the data just reflects a single, pandemic-hit year, and that a truer picture would emerge from a wider look into traffic injuries and fatalities.
So, what does the data show?
A whole lot, as it turns out, but mostly the law of small numbers.
Given the low numbers of road deaths in Malta, a change of just a handful of road deaths from one year to the next can drastically affect the ratio, making Malta’s roads appear to be some of the safest in Europe one year and among the most dangerous the next. The same is true of
other micro-states in Europe, such as Luxembourg.
The year highlighted in the ACEA graph, 2021, happens to be the year with the lowest number of road deaths in Malta over the past decade, with nine people losing their life as a result of a traffic accident. Fast forward just one year and 2022 was the deadliest, with 28 road deaths.
A different graph on the ACEA’s website captures this quirk, showing that Malta registered the largest drop in road deaths in Europe between 2019 and 2021 at almost 44%, despite there only being seven fewer road fatalities.
A report by the European Transport Safety Council shows a similar pattern, pointing out that road deaths in Malta increased by a staggering 189% between 2021 and 2022, miles ahead of any other country. Second in the list? Luxembourg, at 50%, with no other country in Europe scoring higher than 35%, despite most of them seeing an uptick in road deaths following the end of pandemic lockdowns.
The safety council itself is at pains to call for caution when reading the numbers, noting that “annual numbers of deaths in Luxembourg and Malta are particularly small and are, therefore, subject to substantial annual fluctuation”.
Preliminary EU data for 2023 also captures these
fluctuations, showing how
nd road fatalities per million people in Malta went from 17 in 2021 (the lowest in Europe, as shown in the ACEA graph) to 50 in 2022 (more than the EU average) to 26 in 2023 (well below the EU average again).
Such drastic changes from one year to the next make a single-year snapshot comparison between Malta and the rest of Europe largely meaningless when stripped of the broader picture.
Road deaths are only one measure of road safety, with the number of accidents and injuries playing an equally big part in determining whether roads are safe.
Are road accidents on the rise?
Yes, quite clearly. Accidents have risen steadily from just over 14,500 in 2012 to almost 16,500 last year. This includes all kinds of accidents, from major crashes resulting in deaths or serious injury, to minor incidents where nobody was hurt.
Unsurprisingly, numbers dipped during 2020 and 2021, when lockdowns meant that fewer people were on the road.
More accidents don’t automatically mean that there are more road deaths or injuries though.
Road deaths have tended to fluctuate over the years, going from a low of nine (in 2012 and 2021) to a high of 28 (in 2022). On average, there were 15.75 road deaths per year between 2012 and 2023.
The number of injuries has fluctuated too, with the 1,665 injuries recorded in 2023 higher than several other years but lower than the over 1,850 recorded in 2016 and 2017.
But of the injuries caused by road accidents, more of them are turning out to be serious. While there used to be somewhere in the region of 300 grievous road injuries a decade ago, this is now up, reaching 433 last year.
So how does Malta compare to other countries?
Again, it depends on what year – and what metrics – you’re looking at.
The European Transport Safety Council tries to take a wider view, taking the number of road deaths in each country over the three years of 2019 to 2021 and seeing how these relate to the distances travelled by vehicles within that country.
Unlike the measure of road fatalities per million people, this approach tries to eliminate the differences between countries where few people drive and those where most people drive (like Malta, which regularly registers among the highest rates of vehicle ownership in the world).
The council’s latest report finds that Norway tops this list, with just 2.2 road deaths per billion kilometres travelled by vehicles in the country. Malta lags far behind in 16th place, with 6.3 deaths per billion kilometres, more than the average of 5.7.
While not a perfect measure (one country doesn’t include motorcycle deaths for instance, while another only takes deaths on main roads into account), it is nonetheless a useful indication of how Malta compares to its European counterparts.
The report also finds that accidents in Malta tend to be particularly severe, with 24 serious injuries for every death registered on the road.
While this is more than any other country, bar the Netherlands, the report warns that the numbers are not directly comparable, since different countries sometimes have varying definitions of what a serious injury is.
Verdict
The graph shows data from a single year, 2021, when road deaths were unusually low, lower than at any other point since 2012.
Since Malta tends to report low numbers of road fatalities, a change in just a handful of road deaths has a drastic effect on comparative ratios. The same ratio a year later, in 2022, would show that Malta’s ratio of road fatalities is almost three times higher than the EU average.
More broadly, the number of traffic-related accidents increased from 14,500 in 2012 to 16,500 in 2023. The number of injuries and road deaths has tended to fluctuate from one year to the next, although there was a dip in both during 2020 and 2021, when fewer people were on the road.
Data comparing the number of road deaths in Malta by distance travelled over a threeyear period suggests that Malta had 6.3 deaths per billion kilometres, more than the EU average of 5.7.
The claim is, therefore, misleading because, although the claim may, in itself, be partly or entirely true, it is presented in a manner that is not representative of the facts within a broader context.