Which Countries Cut Road Deaths in Half Since 2010?

Quick answer: 108 countries reported fewer road traffic deaths in 2021 than in 2010, according to the World Health Organization's Global Status Report on Road Safety 2023. Ten countries cut their tolls by more than half: Belarus, Brunei Darussalam, Denmark, Japan, Lithuania, Norway, the Russian Federation, Trinidad and Tobago, the United Arab Emirates and Venezuela. A further 35 countries reduced deaths by 30 to 50%. The largest regional improvement was in Europe, where deaths fell 36% since 2010.

The ten countries that cut deaths by half

WHO's published list of the biggest improvers between 2010 and 2021 names ten countries that reduced road traffic deaths by more than 50%:

• Belarus
• Brunei Darussalam
• Denmark
• Japan
• Lithuania
• Norway
• Russian Federation
• Trinidad and Tobago
• United Arab Emirates
• Venezuela

That is a strikingly mixed group: wealthy Nordic states with long road-safety traditions, middle-income countries in Eastern Europe and Latin America, and small island states. Their shared achievement matters because it shows that halving road deaths is not a privilege of rich countries alone — Venezuela and Trinidad and Tobago are not high-income countries, and several others on the list were not wealthy when their improvement began.

The wider group of improvers

Beyond the ten leaders, WHO reports:

• 35 more countries reduced road deaths by 30 to 50% between 2010 and 2021.
• In total, 108 countries — more than half of all UN Member States — reported a drop in road traffic deaths over the period.
• The European Region recorded the largest regional decline: 36% fewer deaths since 2010. Europe also has the lowest death rate in the world, at 7 per 100,000 people in 2021, compared with 19 per 100,000 in the African Region.

That regional result is worth pausing on. Europe combines some of the heaviest car use in the world with the lowest death rate — proof that high motorisation does not have to mean high death tolls.

What the successful countries did

WHO attributes the reductions to four kinds of action, applied together:

• Better laws and enforcement on the key behavioural risks: speeding, drink-driving, seat-belt use, motorcycle helmet use and child restraints.
• Safer road design: sidewalks, cycle lanes and the physical separation of pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists from fast traffic.
• Safer vehicles: features such as electronic stability control and advanced braking fitted as standard, not as expensive options.
• Better post-crash care: faster emergency response and trauma care so that people who do crash are more likely to survive.

No single measure does the job on its own. The countries on the list combined legislation with engineering and emergency care — and, crucially, enforced the laws they passed.

The global gap that remains

The success stories are real, but they are the exception, not the rule. Set them against the world total:

• Global road deaths fell from 1.25 million in 2010 to an estimated 1.19 million in 2021 — a drop of just 5%.
• The United Nations' target for the Decade of Action for Road Safety 2021–2030 is to halve road deaths by 2030. WHO's Director-General has said progress is "nowhere near fast enough" to reach it.
• Nine in ten road deaths still happen in low- and middle-income countries, and low-income countries face a death rate of 21 per 100,000 — nearly three times the high-income rate of 8.

In other words: the playbook works, as 108 countries have shown. It simply has not been used widely enough.

The modest global improvement happened even as the world added nearly a billion people and the motor vehicle fleet more than doubled between 2010 and 2021 — which is why WHO describes the decline as evidence that road-safety measures work, but far too slowly.

How these numbers were counted

WHO's 2023 report compares each Member State's estimated road traffic deaths in 2021 with its 2010 figure, combining official death registrations with statistical modelling for countries where registration is incomplete. The percentage reductions are calculated from those estimates. In small countries, a handful of fewer deaths can move the percentage a lot, so the ten countries named here are those that cleared WHO's published 50% threshold — a demanding bar that filters out statistical noise. For the running world toll see the global statistics, for news-tracked incidents accidents today, and for the UK picture the United Kingdom page.