Analysing the transport statistics published by the government yields some interesting insights into both the traffic on our roads, as well as how safe they are.
- The number of vehicles on the road has risen after a post 2008-drop, and is broadly back to 2010 levels, with a slight shift towards cars and trucks
- Reported accidents are down significantly over time, and there has been a 30% drop in serious casualties in the last 10 years, though this has flattened in the last five
- Despite this and the number of accidents on motorcycles falling over time, the number of fatalities remains between 10-15 most years
There was a clear decline in the number of vehicles on the road – for both cars and bikes – through the post-recession fall of 2008. However, since then vehicle numbers have risen back up to be broadly in line with 2009 levels, with a slight shift towards more cars. In the last 10 years, there are 6.5% more vehicles on the road, with 10.7% more trucks and 7.3% more cars. Bikes have increased slightly less at 5.6%. In the latest year of data (2023) we had the most vehicles on the road since 2010.
Unfortunately we do not have updated census data since 2016 to compare this to, but the if the overall population tracks the labour base, then we’d expect the number of vehicles per person to have increased.
Given that the number of vehicles on the road has been broadly flat, what has happened to accidents?
Interestingly, there is a very clear decrease in the number of reported accidents over time, with the largest drop occurring from 2003 to 2010. However, in the last 5 years the number of ‘serious’ accidents has actually increased 1.8%, though overall accidents are down almost 10%. The data suggests we’re having significantly fewer reported accidents, however the serious ones are leveled out in the past few years.
Unfortunately, the number of fatalities (the bottom bar in the above) have remained broadly uncorrelated to the overall number of accidents. After a few years around 2011 with under 10 per year, it has generally been between 10 and 20, with the latest year (2023) having 13.
Given the relative protection of a car versus bike accident, we may expect this to be reflected in accidents by type of vehicle:
However it’s clear to see in the reported figures that accidents involving motorcycles (and auxiliary) are both down in both recently and in longer term. Indeed, the reported accidents are down overall by almost 40% over 10 years, and almost 20% in the last five. This suggests improving safety on the roads which is born out by some of the casualty data, but not the serious in recent years nor fatalities across the time period.
BermudaData.org 