Crash Statistics

♦ Car crashes cost British Columbia is $8.8 billion dollars annually

♦ B.C.’s 2010 firefighting budget was 63 million, or 0.716% of our annual car crash expense

♦ 52% of road fatalities are drivers

♦ 48% of fatalities are passengers or bystanders

♦ 2007 had 417 car crash fatalities and 25,481 reported injuries

♦ Every hour almost 3 people are injured or killed

♦ More pedestrians than motorcycle riders died in 2007

♦ 74 pedestrians and 48 motorcycle riders were killed

♦ 10% of British Columbians don’t wear their seat belts

♦ Social cost of car crashes (8,800 million), relative to B.C.’s 2010/11 Budget:

→ 22% of tax revenue (39,893 million)

→ 123% of education expenditure (7,142 million)

→ 13968% of firefighting costs (63 million)

Source of the social cost of car crashes: Ministry of Transportation August 2007 report

♦ $62.7 billion dollars are spent annually on car crashes in Canada

♦ 14.5% of drivers have fallen asleep or nodded off while driving in the past year – 25% of them had to break or steer to avoid a crash

♦ There is an average of 2,600 car crash fatalities in Canada each year – that’s 2,600 mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, friends and neighbors

♦ Roughly one third of all Canadian drivers killed in car crashes have been drinking

♦ Road crashes are the leading cause of death for people under 40

♦ 1 in 2 Canadians will be injured in a car crash during their lifetime

♦ 3,500 people die on the road each day

♦ 1.2 million per year

♦ 1 person every 25 seconds

♦ In the United States 1 in 260 miles are driven drunk – that’s 21 billion drunk miles per year

♦ Only 1 arrest is made for every 27,000 miles driven drunk

♦ Over 50 million people are injured in car crashes each year

♦ Active adults aged 15-44 account for more than half of traffic accidents

♦ The global cost of car crashes is estimated at 518 billion dollars – Canada represents 12.1% of this expense

♦ Car crashes cost each British Columbian $1,933 annually, or 51% of the per capita health care expenditure

♦ The average cost of a car crash is $77,000

♦ ICBC invests 10% of their profits into road safety, how much should our government invest?

♦ ICBC spends 46 million dollars on improving road safety each year. That is an investment to minimize the insurance claims they pay out which is about 483 million dollars annually. If car crashes ceased to exist, ICBC would save 483 million dollars.

♦ If car crashes ceased to exist, British Columbia would save 8.8 billion dollars.

Are we investing enough of our government resources into improving road safety?