The contents of two letters expressing concern about road fatalities in Malta (The Sunday Times of Malta, December 11 and December 25, 2016) were disputed by Karl Soler, who claimed  that Maltese drivers are “Europe’s safest drivers” (The Sunday Times of Malta, January 1),  on the basis of raw pooled data on per capita traffic road deaths in the EU.

Such EU data are not ‘scientific’; they are simply a gross number representing a rough cross-sectional picture across differing (mostly large) European countries – which, depending on how they are used, can both mislead and enlighten. As already explained, countries differ in a multitude of factors as size, standard of driving, law enforcement, extent  of motorways, traffic volume, distances travelled, weather conditions and transport infrastructure.

Undifferentiated EU per capita traffic road death numbers are therefore inapplicable to individual countries (especially a small highly urbanised island like Malta) because they do not permit statistical analysis to ‘condition out’ local factors.

As to associations between traffic speed and road accidents, methodologically sound scientific analyses of traffic data have long confirmed the relationship between speed and road accidents. Put simply, the higher the speed, the greater the probability of a crash and the severity of the crashes.

Examples of sound scientific evidence are the analysis sponsored by the Swedish National Road Administration and the Norwegian Public Roads Administration and a study by the European Transport Safety Council. The latter showed that twice as many deaths occurred on motorway sections without speed limits compared to stretches with a permanent limit.

On the basis of these and other similar studies, it was predicted by the UK Department for Transport that raising the UK motorway speed limit from 70 mph to 80mph would increase deaths by 20 per cent.

The association between speed and accidents applies equally to lower speeds in urban road accidents. An extensive 20-year (1986-2006) controlled interrupted time series analysis study (BMJ 2009:339; b4469) showed that introduction of 20mph (30km/h) zones was associated with a reduction in road casualties of 40 per cent.

In the absence of strong evidence to the contrary, we cannot remain passive in the face of tragic and unnecessary road deaths to which exces-sive speed is undoubtedly a contributory factor.

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