Broughton J., Knowles J., Yannis G., Evgenikos P., Papantoniou P., “Seasonal distributions of road fatalities in Europe”, Proceedings of the 13th World Conference on Transportation Research, COPPE – Federal University of Rio de Janeiro at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, July 2013.

Although the annual number of people who were killed in road accidents in Europe has fallen over many years, the distribution of the annual number by month has scarcely changed. This research examines the extent to which the number of people killed in road accidents varies by month across the EU through the use of the EU CARE database with disaggregated data on road accidents. Time series data from 19 EU countries over a period of 10 years (2000-2009) are correlated with basic safety parameters such as the mode of transport, type of road, time of day, day of week, weather, hours of daylight, age and gender of the driver. The distribution of fatalities by month tends to vary most in Central Europe and least in Western Europe. The seasonal variation of fatalities depends also upon gender, age and is greater on Sundays than on other weekdays, while motorcycling is the mode of transport with the most seasonal fatality distribution. Furthermore, variations through the year according to weather and the hours of daylight are likely to contribute to the seasonality that has been observed, and these also vary across Europe. The results of the analysis allow for an overall assessment of seasonal variation of road accident fatalities by socioeconomic characteristics, providing thus useful support to decision makers working for the improvement of safety in the European road network. These observations, along with the other findings presenting in this paper, could be used to shape public policy in a way that it improves the road safety level across Europe.