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More than 1000 Bulgarians found their death on the roads across the country in 2008, statistics show. Photo by BGNES
Bulgaria is Europe's leader in terms of road deaths, sharing the unflattering top spot together with Latvia, Greece, Romania, Poland and Lithuania, shows a survey of the European Transport Safety Council.
While in the EU there are on average 79 people killed per million inhabitants, compared to 122 in the USA and 69 in Australia, their number is two times higher in Bulgaria - 150 per million inhabitants.
Sweden, the Netherlands and the UK remain the safest European countries roadwise, behind Malta, where there are special reasons for its low road mortality.
Switzerland and Norway have been among the frontrunners in Europe for some time and Germany is close on the heels of the leading group. Ireland, Spain, France, Luxembourg, Portugal and Belgium all used to be underperformers, but now have a medium level of road safety.
After a particularly bad 2007, the European Union countries saw in 2008 a promising decrease in road deaths by 8.5%, except for Bulgaria and Romania, which acceded to the bloc in 2004.
Comparison of developments up to 2008 shows that some countries have reached reductions of more than 40%. Luxembourg (-49%), France (-48%) and Portugal (-47%) have progressed best. Spain and Latvia are catching up with reduction of more than 43% for which they have been recognised with the "2009 Road Safety PIN Award".
In Romania and Bulgaria, the numbers of road deaths were higher in 2008 than in 2001.
The European Union has set itself the ambitious target of reducing the yearly number of road deaths by 50% by 2010 compared to 2001.
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