Monitoring Progress in Urban Road Safety 2022 Update Report

23 October 2023

Every minute, someone in the world dies in urban traffic. Local governments are at the forefront of efforts to prevent these needless road deaths. Their actions – speed limit reductions and radical changes in street design, for example – are delivering measurable results. One city, Warsaw, achieved the UN target for halving road deaths between 2010 and 2020. Barcelona and Edmonton came close to meeting the target.

With the launch of the Second UN Decade of Action for Road Safety and its target to halve road deaths and injuries by 2030, all cities need to adopt measures that have proved to be effective. This report investigates the progress made in the First Decade of Action from 2010 to 2020. Some cities have achieved more promising results than others. Therefore, there are opportunities to accelerate progress using evidence of success in peer cities to support the adoption of more effective policies.

This  Monitoring Progress in Urban Road Safety 2022 Update report tracks developments in urban road safety to help reduce the number of serious traffic crashes on city streets. It traces the number of road fatalities and serious injuries in 32 cities around the world for the period 2010-20 using different indicators that measure the risk of dying in traffic for various road user groups. The indicators use three-year averages to capture trends from small annual data sets, i.e. the year 2020 is represented by the average for 2018-20. The cities participating in the benchmarking are located in Europe (18), the Americas (11), Oceania (2) and Africa (1). They work together in the International Transport Forum’s Safer City Streets network.