Road accidents on Halloween: 40% more pedestrian deaths
Road safety and Halloween have gone hand in hand for a long time now: there have been many awareness and awareness campaigns over the years. Despite everything, there is a 40% increase in pedestrian deaths related to an automobile accident compared to the other days of the year, according to a study carried out by Canadian researchers.
More tangible than poisoned treats
Stories about poison candy resurface every year, and while some isolated cases do surface, most of them are just urban legends. On the other hand, what is more tangible, and what should scare a lot more, are fatal road accidents involving pedestrians.
In 2019, a study published by Canadian researchers in the JAMA Network revealed that pedestrian deaths caused by an accident with a road vehicle rose from 608 to 851 on Halloween. These historical averages were established by data collected between 1975 and 2016 in the United States.
Unsurprisingly, children are the group most affected by this sharp increase. We note more specifically that those aged between four and eight years see their fatality rate increase by more than 10 times compared to the other days of the year.
The fatal road accidents that occur on Halloween are a tragic annual reminder of systematic flaws in road safety. On Halloween and throughout the year, most child pedestrian deaths occur in residential neighborhoods. These events highlight shortcomings in urban development (lack of sidewalks, dangerous street crossings, etc.) and failures in traffic control, not to mention the negligence and recklessness that motorists can show.
Far fewer fatal accidents than before
The first lines of this text, on the other hand, do not paint an adequate portrait of road safety in the country, even though they only focus on one day of the year in particular.
Since 2001, Transport Canada has been tracking the number of fatal collisions between motorists, and there has been a marked improvement. In 2001, 2,415 fatal collisions were recorded in the country, compared to 1,591 in 2020; this represents an improvement of almost 35%.
Fatal collisions involving pedestrians have only been recorded since 2016, and here too there has been a marked improvement. There were 355 deaths in 2016, compared to 266 in 2020. This represents an improvement of around 25%.
