Local Road Safety analyses

The typology of accidents is specific to each territory. The particularities of injury accidents are explained by different mobility in rural or urban areas (greater car use in the countryside than in cities, bicycles more present in the city...), meteorology varying from one region to another, different behaviour according to location, etc.

In this chapter, you will discover the analyses of accidentality and the specificities of each territory: rural territories, urban and peri-urban territories, as well as overseas territories. A common indicator for comparing accidentality by territory (comparisons of counties, regions or even countries) is the number of people killed in relation to the number of inhabitants. Variations in mortality per million inhabitants between regions are lower than between counties, with the number of people killed per region being higher than per county, and therefore less subject to statistical hazards or extreme values.

Between 2017 and 2021, road mortality as a percentage of the population in France mainland was 47. By departments, the rate varies from 17 in the Hauts-de-Seine, the Seine-Saint-Denis and  the Val-de-Marne to 119 in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence. The lowest rates are observed in the departments of Ile-de-France (except Seine-et-Marne).

On average between 2017 and 2021, the number of people killed varies in a ratio of 1 to 19 ( 5 in the Lozère and 102 in the Bouches-du-Rhône), with an average in metropolitan France of 32 and a median of 29. For 37 departments, the number of deaths is between 15 and 30. Among the extreme values, 12 departments have a mortality of less than 15 people killed (sparsely populated departments). In contrast, 24 departments recorded more than 40 people killed ; they are departments with a strong urban component. One-third of the departments concentrate half of the number of total killed.

The nature and length of the road network varies greatly from one county to another. The length varies from less than 3,000 km for Paris, the inner suburbs (Hauts-de-Seine, Seine-Saint-Denis and Val-de-Marne) and the Territory of Belfort, to more than 20,000 km for Gironde, Puy-de-Dôme and Côtes-d'Armor. While the proportions of motorways and trunk roads vary little (between 0% and 3% each), the same cannot be said for the proportions of county council roads and municipal roads, particularly in relation to the presence of large urban areas:

⦁ county council roads (excluding Paris): 14% (in Seine-Saint-Denis) to 64% (in Aube);

⦁ municipal roads (excluding Paris, of which only 1 km out of 1,626 is not on a municipal road): 34% (in Aube) to 84% (in Seine-Saint-Denis).

The average annual number of people killed per 10,000 km of road over the 2013-2015 period ranges from 6 for Creuse to more than 100 for the counties of the inner suburbs, Bouches-du-Rhône and Paris (236).

Silouette bord de route