The treatment for this may be to increase signage, post an advisory speed limit, apply a high-friction road surface, add crash barriers or any one of a number of other visible interventions. The immediate result may be to reduce collisions at the bend, but the subconscious relaxation on leaving the "dangerous" bend may cause drivers to act with fractionally less care on the rest of the road, resulting in an increase in collisions elsewhere on the road, and no overall improvement over the area. In the same way, increasing familiarity with the treated area will often result in a reduction over time to the previous level of care and may result in faster speeds around the bend due to perceived increased safety (risk compensation). Epidemiology
In 2004 50 million more were injured in motor vehicle collisions. In 2013, between 1.25 million and 1.4 million people were killed in traffic collisions, up from 1.1 million deaths in 1990. That number represents about 2.5% of all deaths. Approximately 50 million additional people were injured in traffic collisions, a number unchanged from 2004.India recorded 105,000 traffic deaths in a year, followed by China with over 96,000 deaths. This makes motor vehicle collisions the leading cause of injury and death among children worldwide 10–19 years old (260,000 children die a year, 10 million are injured) and the sixth leading preventable cause of death in the United States. In 2019, there were 36,096 people killed and 2.74 million people injured in motor vehicle traffic crashes on roadways in the United States.
In the United States, the definition used in the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) run by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is a person who dies within 30 days of a crash on a US public road involving a vehicle with an engine, the death being the result of the crash. In the U.S., therefore, if a driver has a non-fatal heart attack that leads to a road-traffic crash that causes death, that is a road-traffic fatality. However, if the heart attack causes death prior to the crash, then that is not a road-traffic fatality. The definition of a road-traffic fatality can change with time in the same country. For example, fatality was defined in France as a person who dies in the six days (pre 2005) after the collision and was subsequently changed to the 30 days (post 2005) after the collision. History
The worlds first recorded road traffic death involving a motor vehicle occurred on 31 August 1869.