Abstract:
Every year, approximately 1.24 million fatalities and 20 to 50 million non-fatal injuries occur worldwide due to road traffic collisions. These pose a serious social and economic challenge to all countries around the world. . Effective road safety measures can only be introduced if the extent of the problem and its underlying factors are thoroughly explored. Unfortunately, reliable estimates of annual road crash injuries are not available for most countries. Pakistan faces a similar problem and in spite of a rapidly growing population and sharp increase in vehicle fleet size, no real efforts have been made to obtain estimates of the number of injuries resulting from road traffic crashes every year. This study presents an attempt at estimating annual road crash injuries for Pakistan using data provided by the World Health Organization (WHO) and International Road Federation (IRF). To estimate and explore the different factors responsible for road crash injuries in Pakistan, econometric models have been estimated using two different response variables: (1) injuries per hundred thousand population and (2) injuries per a thousand registered vehicles. Total number of registered vehicles, maximum speed on rural roads, enforcement levels of seatbelt law, income levels and safety audit of new roads were found as significant explanatory variables. Modelling results revealed that models estimated using international data were unsuitable and a poor fit \ for predicting annual road crash injuries for Pakistan. However, the developed models helped explore different factors responsible for road crash injuries. Annual road crash injuries for Pakistan were estimated using annual crash injuries data from seventy-four countries having vital registration systems. Based on the injuries per hundred thousand population, a total of 637,283 annual crash injuries have been estimated for Pakistan for the year 2014. This study also carried out a detailed comparison of road crash injury rates of Pakistan with other regional countries as well as countries with different income levels. These road crash injury estimates can be used by the National Highway Authority and Ministry of Communication as input for formulation of multipronged road safety improvement policies for Pakistan.
