Irish scientist Mary Ward died when she fell out of her cousins steam car and was run over by it.The British road engineer J. J. Leeming, compared the statistics for fatality rates in Great Britain, for transport-related incidents both before and after the introduction of the motor vehicle, for journeys, including those once by water that now are undertaken by motor vehicle: For the period 1863–1870 there were: 470 fatalities per million of population (76 on railways, 143 on roads, 251 on water); for the period 1891–1900 the corresponding figures were: 348 (63, 107, 178); for the period 1931–1938: 403 (22, 311, 70) and for the year 1963: 325 (10, 278, 37). Leeming concluded that the data showed that "travel accidents may even have been more frequent a century ago than they are now, at least for men". He also compared the circumstances around road deaths as reported in various American states before the widespread introduction of 55 mph (89 km/h) speed limits and drunk-driving laws. They took into account thirty factors which it was thought might affect the death rate. Among these were included the annual consumption of wine, of spirits and of malt beverages—taken individually—the amount spent on road maintenance, the minimum temperature, certain of the legal measures such as the amount spent on police, the number of police per 100,000 inhabitants, the follow-up programme on dangerous drivers, the quality of driver testing, and so on. The thirty factors were finally reduced to six by eliminating those found to have small or negligible effect.
United Nations
Owing to the global and massive scale of the issue, with predictions that by 2020 road traffic deaths and injuries will exceed HIV/AIDS as a burden of death and disability, the United Nations and its subsidiary bodies have passed resolutions and held conferences on the issue. The first United Nations General Assembly resolution and debate was in 2003 The World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims was declared in 2005. In 2009 the first high level ministerial conference on road safety was held in Moscow. The World Health Organization, a specialized agency of the United Nations Organization, in its Global Status Report on Road Safety 2009, estimates that over 90% of the worlds fatalities on the roads occur in low-income and middle-income countries, which have only 48% of the worlds registered vehicles, and predicts road traffic injuries will rise to become the fifth leading cause of death by 2030.The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 3, target 3.6 is directed at reducing road injuries and deaths. February 2020 saw a global ministerial conference which brought the Stockholm Declaration, setting a target to reduce global traffic deaths and injuries by 50% within ten years. The decade of 2021-2030 was declared the second decade of road safety. Collision migration
Collisions migration refers to a situation where action to reduce road traffic collisions in one place may result in those collisions resurfacing elsewhere. For example, an accident blackspot may occur at a dangerous bend.