Traffic legislation and safety in Europe concerning the moped - Swov

2.3.1. Description of CARE
Table 2.5 shows that the southern European countries Italy and Spain, but
also Germany and France, are countries with a lot of mopeds. As a
consequence the number of killed mopedists is also high in these countries.
The exception is the comparatively low number of mopedists killed in
Germany.
The final two columns give rates to compare the European countries
concerning the numbers of mopedists killed. In the last-but-one column this
is the crash rate (the number of killed mopedists as a percentage of the total
number of road users killed), and in the last column the vehicle-rate (the
number of killed mopedists per 100,000 mopeds).
The crash rate is calculated using both the ECMT- data (see the upper part
in the cells of the table) as well as the CARE data (see lower part).
This crash rate gives high percentages for the southern European countries
Italy, Portugal and to a lesser degree for Spain. In contrast we see a very
low score in Austria, Germany, Luxembourg, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland,
and the United Kingdom.
The vehicle-rate (see the last column) is only expressed in the figures of the
ECMT-data and not with CARE-figures, due to more available figures from
ECMT-data.
On average the countries with low crash rates, also have low vehicle rates.
This confirms that the presented figures are reliable.
France and Belgium have a median score in the crash rate, but a bad score
in the vehicle rate. The problem with Belgium is that the figures of the
number of mopeds are from 1987 instead of from 1998. Probably the
number of mopeds is too low, which gives a high rate.
In the UK the number of mopeds and the number of killed mopedists are
small. UK is more a country for riding motorcycles than mopeds (Department
for Transport, 2002).
CARE is a EU-database of road crashes resulting in death or injury. It
contains no statistics on material damage, only on crashes. The major
difference between CARE and most other existing international databases is
the high level of disaggregation, i.e. CARE comprises detailed data on
individual crashes as collected by the Member States. Its structure allows for
maximum flexibility and potential with regard to analysing the information
contained in the system, and opens new possibilities in the field of crash
analysis.
The purpose of CARE is to provide a powerful tool which makes it possible
to identify and quantify road safety problems throughout the European
roads, evaluate the efficiency of road safety measures, determine the
relevance of Community actions, and facilitate the exchange of experience
in this field.
Today, the only systems comparable to the CARE database as far as the
degree of disaggregation is concerned, ARE FARS (used in the USA) and
BIS used by SWOV in Netherlands.
The EU Council decided in 1993 to create CARE (CARE - Community
database on Accidents on the Roads in Europe). Instead of entering into a
lengthy process of defining and adopting a new standardised structure, it
was decided that the national data sets should be integrated into the CARE
14 SWOV publication R-2004-10