Approximately 1.3 million people die each year on the world’s roads, according to the 2009 Global Status Report on Road Safety published by the World Health Organization (WHO). Using data from the report, we created the two maps shown above. The first map shows the total number of road traffic deaths by country. The map shows that India (105 thousand) and China (96 thousand) have the highest number of road traffic deaths, which is not surprising given their large populations and large number of registered vehicles. It is worth noting though that while there were approximately 145 million registered vehicles in China in 2009, the total for India was only 72 million. In other words, India had a much higher rate of road traffic deaths per registered vehicle than China.
The second map shows the number of road traffic deaths per 100,000 inhabitants. The largest rates of road traffic deaths occur in Eritrea (48.4), Egypt (41.6), and Libya (40.5). The map also shows that relatively high rates of road traffic deaths occur in many countries in Africa and the Middle East.