Auditor General Janar Holm commented on the National Audit Office's 2024 traffic safety audit: "Current traffic safety program is inflated and Estonia has fallen far short of its national goals in this area. For years, Estonia had been on a downward trend in traffic fatalities, but that progress has stalled in recent years and the goal is slipping further out of reach. While the objectives set on paper are commendable, they are nowhere near adequately backed by funding or concrete action."

The state has in other words put a highly ambitious traffic safety goals down on paper — goals that reality has stubbornly refused to meet. Since meeting those targets depend not only on the state but also on all road users, these unattainable objectives offer a convenient nation-wide tool that can be used to shift the blame publicly onto drivers, accusing them of not doing their best or being careful enough.

Who needs daily traffic accident news?

It all begins slowly but surely with the daily reports on the Police and Border Guard Board's website on how someone has had a bad day in traffic. Maybe couple of cars have collided, someone's fallen off from a scooter or perhaps even got themselves killed. But why in the first place do we talk about traffic accidents so often and why in Estonia particularly?

Why report on a daily basis almost exclusively about traffic and where are the rest of Estonia's "daily trauma bulletins"? How many fell off a roof yesterday? How many accidentally drank some poison? There are more than ten times as many fatal accidents in Estonia unrelated to traffic, but beyond the occasional coverage of fire or drowning accidents sharing newspaper space with traffic fatalities, there's a long way to go before other incidents get any attention at all.

In most European countries state reporting on traffic accidents tends to happen less frequently — monthly or quarterly and in more detail once a year. The overly frequent coverage of tragic accidents creates two particularly unpleasant effects in our society: selection bias and plain indifference to such news.

Maybe it's time to simply pull the plug on this historical practice with all of its side effects? It brings no real benefits and in the meantime, we're feeding public indifference, labeling accident victims based on incomplete information and stoking social media outrage.

State promoting a negative traffic safety developments perception

A far more serious concern is the state's systematic and predominantly negative strategic communication, which leaves the public with the impression that the overall traffic situation in Estonia is consistently bad, the main safety targets are not being met and there are no signs of improvement.

Metaphorical traffic safety illustration is following: "Ten kids are throwing balls at each other in a playroom and five of them end up with bumps on their heads. A new batch of twenty is brought in and by the end of the chaos, six walk out with big proud bruises." The official conclusion: kids have started throwing balls more dangerously! Immediate corrective actions must be taken — broader supervision and stricter penalties!

It's worth keeping this in mind when someone goes off on a tangent in a high-pitched voice about traffic fatalities and injuries, without considering the broader context — traffic deaths and injuries are significantly influenced by the number of motor vehicles, overall traffic volume and sometimes simply bad luck.

How much safer has traffic in reality become over the years?

To truly understand the state of traffic safety, we need to look much further back than just a year or two. It likely won't come as a surprise to many that the absolute number of traffic fatalities in Estonia is currently 30–40 percent lower than it was 15 years ago. But during that same period, nearly 300,000 more vehicles have entered our road network. Reducing the absolute number of traffic fatalities on the backdrop of materially increasing number of vehicles on the road and traffic volume, is a major national achievement — one that has not been acknowledged nor even openly discussed enough.

As shown in Figure 1, the number of traffic fatalities in Estonia per vehicle and vehicle-kilometer is now half of what it was 14 years ago. This clearly illustrates that the persistent narrative we've been fed — the overall traffic safety situation has remained poor, goals are not being met and there are no signs of improvement — is misleading at best, if not outright false.

In reality, we've seen a major positive transformation in our traffic culture, infrastructure, technology and enforcement. This is reflected as a long-term sustained and significant improvement in the key metric of traffic safety — fatalities — especially when viewed in the right context and communicated accordingly.

Frankly, it would be extremely odd if there had been no noticeable improvement in traffic safety. That would definitely spark some interesting questions about where a billion-plus in traffic-safety money actually went over last 15 years — and what should happen next to the people in charge.

Figure 1 also conveys a second clear message: we've reached a plateau in safety improvements — a flat zone where most of the low-hanging fruits have already been picked. Furthermore, even modest gains in reducing traffic accidents will now require significantly larger investments, especially in road safety infrastructure as roughly 70 percent of all traffic fatalities reliably occur on our highways.

Of course, traffic safety isn't only about fatalities — it's also about reducing accidents resulting in injuries. The relative decline in injuries (Figure 2) has been much slower, largely because of a significant increase in commuter traffic and as overall traffic intensity continues to rise. However, improvements in road infrastructure and the increasing safety of vehicles have undoubtedly played a major role in driving those numbers down.

Is mass speeding really causing accidents?

In cooperation with the Transport Administration, Tallinn University of Applied Sciences produced a 2023 thesis titled  "Relationships between proven speeding records and traffic accidents in 2013–2022." One of the thesis aims was to investigate whether there are correlations between recorded speed violations and traffic accidents in Estonia. In his research, Anton Eerik Pauts analyzed every recorded instance of speeding and every registered accident over a ten-year period — a total of 1.5 million speeding violations and 0.5 million accidents, including 200,000 minor parking lot collisions.

This is a unique and wide-ranging study by Estonian standards, covering an extensive timeframe and providing what should be a comprehensive answer to whether and how drivers' general speeding behavior affects the number of accidents they cause. The study does not, however, answer the question of how a chosen speed influenced the outcome of any particular accident — that requires a detailed investigation of each incident's circumstances.

The results of the study are quite surprising. An analysis of 667,000 vehicles and two million cases concluded that "The correlation between speeding and causing traffic damage is insignificant or even nonexistent (r=0.06)." Should we scrap speed limits? Reassign traffic enforcement officers to shuffle papers in low-stress office jobs? Definitely not — because speed, as a force that increases exponentially, will always amplify the severity of a crash's outcome at least for as long as the laws of physics still apply.

Given that no statistical correlation was found between the widespread occurrence of speeding (committed by 77–82 percent of drivers) and the number of accidents caused by these drivers, it raises questions about the Transport Administration's conclusion that speed is the primary cause in 44 percent of all serious accidents. Are Estonia's serious crashes really so unique? For comparison, in the United States, speed is considered a risk factor in just 28 percent of serious accidents, and traffic safety in the U.S. is notably worse, with three times as many fatalities per million residents compared to Estonia.

Of course, it is quite literally a matter of life and death to obey the 30 km/h speed limit in urban areas with pedestrians, cyclists and especially children around. At that speed, a pedestrian is ten times more likely to survive a collision than if the vehicle were to be traveling at 50 km/h. Why not simply give them a chance? Speeding in these areas gains the driver virtually no time, while a pedestrian or a child rushing home from school has everything to lose.

The study's data, along with the Transport Administration's massive dataset of hundreds of millions of hidden speed measurements, fortunately reveals another insight: genuine traffic lunatics (represented by the orange spike on the right side of Figure 3) — those drivers who consistently and significantly exceed speed limits (by 40+ km/h), endangering others — are mercifully rare in Estonia.

These traffic terrorists make up only 0.2 percent of all drivers — around 2,000 individuals. Which, in turn, means that the remaining 698,000 licensed drivers, while not saints, certainly don't deserve to be collectively crucified every time one speed extremist makes the news.

Accident risk factors not their 'main causes'

Serious questions arise on how the Transport Administration, in its 2024 annual traffic summary, has attributed speed as one of the "main causes" in nearly half of all the serious incidents (44 percent) — which is 28 times. Upon closer inspection, it turns out that ten of the drivers labeled as "speeding" at the time of the accident were also intoxicated and two more were driving without a license (though sober).

Classifying contributing risk factors as "main causes" violates international traffic safety standards. While a contributing factor may indeed turn out to be a main cause, it certainly cannot be labeled as such outright without further evidence. Presenting conclusions in this way misleads the public by creating a false impression on cause-and-effect relationships.

Simply put — intoxicated and inadequate drivers should also not be lumped together with sober ones. Drunk driving — one of the most severe traffic offenses — should have its own distinct category where the associated risk factors of intoxicated drivers are accounted for, be it speed, infrastructure, darkness or any combination of these. Figure 4 provides an example of what the 2024 traffic risk factors breakdown could look like if speeding under the influence were merged with intoxication. Even this is a simplification, as it does not properly treat the interaction between intoxication and other relevant risk factors.

In conclusion, it would be good to see a bit more balance and positivity in how traffic safety information is communicated. I sincerely hope we find ways to talk a bit more about what has clearly improved — because in truth there's quite a lot of that.

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