Reliable data on traffic deaths are important for planning road safety programmes and evaluating progress. Although pedestrians comprise approximately 40% of traffic deaths in low-income and middle-income countries, official government statistics in India suggest that pedestrians comprise less than 10% of deaths.
Over the past four decades, bicycle ownership has been documented in various countries but not globally analyzed. This paper presents an effort to fill this gap by tracking household bicycle possession. First, we gather survey data from 150 countries and extract percentage household bicycle ownership values. Performing cluster analysis, we determined four groups with the weighted mean percentage ownership ranging from 20% to 81%. Generally, bicycle ownership was highest in Northern Europe and lowest in West, Central and North Africa, and Central Asia.
This new World Bank report quantifies the health losses from road deaths and injuries worldwide, as part of the path-finding Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study. Combined with the deaths arising from vehicle pollution, the road transport death toll exceeds that of, for example, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, or diabetes
