by These days, who has not already pulled a suitcase on the way to the plane, the train, the bus, or the car, is thinking about doing it. Many of us will be moving around in our private vehicles, on our way to where we will spend our well-earned vacation. It is time, then, to call for caution. That they are not exaggerated or unnecessary calls. Although things have improved, we still have to keep our guard up.
How much have they changed? Well, the truth is that they have changed a lot. The historical series of the last 40 years relative to the rate of deaths in traffic accidents in relation to the population almost allows us to think that today we are in another country. We wanted to focus, to observe this rate, on one of the groups that are considered to be more prone to crashes: that of young people and Costco auto insurance.
Well, there are two things to say on this subject. The first is that young people are not, in reality, those who register a higher mortality rate due to circulation in relative terms. In 2019, for example, 4.7 people between the ages of 20 and 24 died in traffic accidents in Spain. But this rate was 9.7 per 100,000, that is, double, in the case of people between 80 and 84. Depending on the number of inhabitants, then more elderly people die than young people; a reality that, moreover, has always been so.
The second thing to say is that young people, in this case, the group of people between 20 and 34 years of age, have experienced a very substantial reduction in their mortality rate. The group of young people reached its highest value in 1989. In that year, 31 young people died in traffic accidents for every 100,000 people in that age group—a ratio that breaks down into 50 per 100,000 for men and 10.6 for women. Since then, the ratio has dropped a lot. It has done much more in the case of men since it started from above, so to speak, and reached a minimum in 2014.
Four deaths per 100,000 inhabitants for the whole, 6.6 for men, and 1.2 for women
Yes, that’s the bad news: the minimum was reached about seven years ago. Since then, the ratio has shown resistance to further decline and, in fact, has experienced some slight upticks.
So, we already have a challenge here: not resign ourselves to the fact that mortality, although low, has the floor. If recent times show anything, it is that the objective of zero accidents is something that we not only can but that we should aspire to.
