Tourist traffic deaths

It's not actually surprising that car accidents cause 50% of tourist deaths in the EU, "tourists" being in the main probably other Europeans. I note that the report does not give the number of deaths so it could be 50% of 212 or 50% of 2012, who knows, which makes the statistic rather meaningless.

We have no reason to believe that Americans are either under or over represented in the tourist traffic accident statistic, although if you consider that we are the wealthiest, if might be argued that we are more likely be able to afford to rent a car and therefore at least as likely, in proportion to our total number, to have a fatal accident.

In the U.S., 163 people per 100,000 die of a heart attack. I would think that most are sudden and unexpected, and due to the stress of travel, that figure is probably higher for American tourist in Europe. At the same time, about 12 people per 100,000, most of them non-tourist, die in traffic accidents in Europe. If more tourist die of traffic accidents in Europe than die of heart attacks, it is reasonable to expect that more than 163 per 100,000 die of traffic accidents, or 13 times the rate of non-tourist Europeans.

I think this can be attributed to most Americans being unprepared to drive at the high speeds on European highways, being unfamiliar with road signs, and often jumping into a car immediately after landing in Europe, tired and jetlagged. I have fallen asleep on the train on my way to my final destination the first day in Europe. Thank goodness I wasn't driving a car.

Difficult to quantify for the EU without spending a lot more time researching this, but a quick search revealed that a US State Department analysis indicated traffic accidents accounted for about a third of the 2,364 deaths of Americans abroad between 2004 and 2006.

Took a brief look at something from Rutgers:

Deaths per 100 million miles-

Auto: .94
Train: .04
Bus: .02
Airplane: .01

So, you are 94 times more likely to die in a car than on a plane. And, you’re also much safer on a train than in a car according to these stats.

Lee, your first paragraph has me puzzled. Are you assuming that the statistics refer to tourists with rental cars and that therefore these must be Americans? Many Europeans holiday all over the continent in their own cars and we all know the French travel by car to the south of France in August, and once out of their own territory, they, too, become tourists. As I said, without the numbers, the 50% is almost meaningless.

Lee..W e have driven all over Europe and other than the Autobahn have not found that people drive any faster than they do in the good ole USA. I realize from all your posts that you are big on train travel which is fine , but there are many of us who like to drive around Europe to the smaller ,more intimate places that perhaps have no train station. Your statistics make no sense to me.

Well, they sure as heck drive faster in Europe then they do in most of Canada .. our speed limits on highways tend to range from 80-110 kph,, and in France I have photos of speed limit signs of 130 kph.. ( which I thought was pretty fast since most people seemed to ZOOM past us and we would be doing 135.. in the slow lane. This was in France mostly , in Switzerland the windy roads did keep the speeds lower .

I will add I think other then disease and ill health the number one cause of death in people is in fact car accidents,, and I mean HERE,,so I imagine a few tourists would in fact die in car accidents in Europe too every year.

Also a lot of these aren't necessarily car drivers but also people run over by cars crossing the road. I would suspect a lot of this statistic is made up by people staggering out of bars and getting run over...

Some accidents and deaths involve riding in taxis.

Phillip....or people looking left-right in the UK instead of right-left. ;)

A little context, please.

The risk is small, and the deaths apparently include pedestrians injured by cars or trucks.

The document Lee links to appears to be a summary for news organizations of a longer report published by the World Health Organization.

That's a document called "Preventing Road Traffic Injury: A Public Health Perspective for Europe" by Francesca Racioppi, Lars Eriksson, Claes Tingvall, and Andres Villaveces. You can download it here.

However, like the fact sheet that Lee quotes, Racioppi et al. provide no original research on tourist fatalities. They do not even define "tourist." Instead, they cite an earlier work, "Scope and Pattern of Tourist Accidents in the European Union," published by the Austrian Institute for Safety and Prevention in 2004 (no author given).

It is in this work that the meaning of Lee's quote can finally be unraveled. (It's here.)

In the executive summary, we learn that the figures are based on data for hospitals in just four countries--Austria, France, Greece, and the Netherlands--and that "tourists" may include any nonresident. 70% of them are EU residents (p. 3).

We also learn that the risk of a tourist dying in an auto accident in these countries is 132 per 100,000 person-years (p. 3), estimated to be 2,900 deaths per year (p.4).

Most significantly, the deaths apparently include pedestrians injured by cars and trucks. So to avoid this small risk, you must avoid Europe--or at least these four countries.

Adam,, I think my point is ,, death by car accident is so common,, that the only place to avoid it ,, would be to stay in your own home and never go out anywhere,, not even to the corner store to get milk. LOL

Thank you, Adam, for some intelligently researched input.

Bottom line - even if you only use trains, you can still get run over by a truck while crossing the street.

Here in DC, a pedestrian was hit, and killed, by a bicycle courier on the sidewalk.

Indeed, there are inherent risks associated with living. I suppose one could simply decide to cease living if troubled by all of the risk. As for some of the shaky logic early on in this thread, I should point out that the US is not the wealthiest country. In Europe alone, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, and Norway are light years ahead of us in per capita GDP. We’re even behind Brunei and came in at number 10 in the world in 2008.