Traffic accidents in the Netherlands
A visual journey that compares different aspects of traffic accidents for all 12 Dutch provinces since 1987. Dive into the distributions of maximum road speeds, weather and light conditions, and accident severities.
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Traffic accidents by speed limit
There was a total of 122 thousand traffic accidents in the Netherlands in 2022.
The color breakdown in the chart is by speed limit:
- 50 to 80km/h (54% of accidents)
- 90 to 130km/h (23%)
- less than 30km/h (18%)
- Unknown (5%)
The chart is a circular distribution for 12 provinces, with Zuid-Holland having the most accidents.
You might ask, are there many bad drivers, reckless cyclist and inattentive pedestrians in Zuid-Holland?
Not really, when we take into consideration the population of each province, it's a lot closer together.
Let's go back to original chart.
And we'll pick two provinces to dive into and further explore historic data and also delve into the other aspects.
We place the 2022 values at the top, such that we can pull down the history.
What unravels is changes in patterns over time that are similar for both provinces. Methods and processes to determine and register traffic accidents have changed significantly over time, for example in 2010. More information can be found on the SVOW website.
Traffic accidents by severity
Let's switch the color breakdown in the chart to accident severity:
- Only material damage
- Injury
- Fatal
By far the most accidents have only material damage. The outer layers of the chart represent fatal accidents. They are almost not visible, in 2022 0.5% of registered accidents were fatal.
Traffic accidents by light conditions
Next, the colors by light conditions:
- Daylight
- Twilight
- Darkness
- Unknown
No big surprises there
Traffic accidents by weather
Finally, by weather conditions:
- Dry
- Rain
- Fog, snow, hail, strong wind gusts
- Unknown
This mostly shows that it doesn't always rain the Netherlands. When you look in the fine details of the data you'll find accidents due to fog happen more often in Fryslân and Flevoland, and accidents due to strong gust of wind appear more in all coastal provinces. However, they are small fractions of the total.