IKN

…road traffic accident figures for 2009.

So yesterday there was a media splurge on the publication of The Andean Community (aka CAN, comprising of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia) and the amount of road traffic accidents they’d all had in 2009. Here’s the chart that comes from the figures, (example report here) which also compares each country to its year 2000 stats the same way as nearly all the reports did:

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We see that in 2009 Bolivia had the most accidents, with 410 for every 100,000 population. Then comes Colombia (though we note the rate has dropped in the last 10 years), then Peru and finally Ecuador. Sure enough, the anti-Evo media in Bolivia started on their ‘world’s gonna end‘ stuff thanks to the numbers.

Then the raw numbers for deaths were also published in the reports, but without any population count context. So this author decided to do the pro rata calculations himself, getting population figures for each country from the CIA Factbook (the best thing them spooks ever did was launch that site…great stats homebase). So here’s how road traffic deaths per 100,000 look for the four countries and also as superduper extra context, the stats for Argentina, the USA and the UK (the sources are mentioned there on the chart):

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So it seems that although there are more accidents per 100k in Bolivia, they tend not to be as life-threatening as in the other countries….more prangs, less speed. On the whole, the Andean region is basically on a par with the fatalities rate of The USA (more or less, Ecuador pushing the envelope a bit). This might not be so, however, if we look at the different metric of deaths per km driven. That number isn’t calculated down here, it is up there and I’m guessing (though not sure) that the USA’s average would drop if we went with it. Meanwhile, in The United Kingdom they obviously drive like whusses.

But Argentina is the real context here. Man, I know how they drive and it doesn’t surprise me to see double the death rate of Bolivia; total dumbasses behind the wheel who all think they’re Fangio.

If you’re interested, here’s the dataset: