Malaysia: Road Accidents Statistic 2000-2006

August 27, 2007 at 4:26 am (Malaysia, Social, Statistic)

By some quick googling, I found some main road accidents statistic of Malaysia via these 2 reports: here and here.  Below here is the data from year 2000 to 2006:

Year     Population       Vehicle           Road            Road            Road
                                Registered     Accidents      Casualties     Deaths

2000    23263600    10598804     250429         50200         6035
2001    23795300    11302545     265175         50473         5849
2002    24526500    12068144     279711         49552         5891
2003    25048300    12868934     298653         52741         6286
2004    25580000    13828889     326815         54091         6228
2005    26130000    14816407     328264         47012         6200
2006    26640000    15790732     341252         35425         6287

By a quick look, number of road accidents and deaths increase steadily while road casualties (injured + death) fluctuates throughout year 2000 to 2006. However, in order to make the data such as road accidents or road deaths more meaningful and comparative, the data will be normalized against: a) Malaysia population for that year of occurence, b) Total number of vehicle registered. The normalization of these data is shown in the 2 graphs as below:

a) Normalization by population:

From the graph, the number of road accidents per 1000 population increase steadily from 10.8 cases in year 2000 to 12.8 cases, an 18.5% increase. On the other hand, the road casualties per 1000 pop. decreases from 2.16 casualties (2000) to 1.33 casualties (2006). The same downward trend is also seen on road deaths per 100 000 pop.: year 2000 recorded 25.9 road deaths for every 100 000 population and seeing a small decrease to 23.6 deaths per 100 000 pop. in year 2006. Although the road deaths is seeing a decrement over the years, it is also remindful to compare it to OECD countries like here: apparently the road deaths in Malaysia decreasing slowly, but it is not good enough. The closest country which has the same traffic accident fatalities like Malaysia is Greece, by the number 14.6 persons per 100 000 pop.

b) Normalization by vehicle registered:

An increment in overall population does not neccesarily mean there will be more vehicle ownership. However for Malaysia case, vehicle ownership (per 1000 pop.) increase steadily from 492 (2000) to 593 (2006): there are more and more people owning the vehicle. From the graph above, we are seeing the number of road accidents per 1000 vehicles decrease over the years: 56.9 accidents to 39.8 accidents per 1000 vehicle. By superficial look, I am tempted to say that an increase in road vehicle does not neccessarily increase the likelihood of more death caused by road accidents. Another side evidence also pointing into the same direction: the number of registered vehicle increase from 10.6 millions to 15.8 million (2000 to 2006, equivalent to 48.99%) while number of deaths shows small increment – 6035 to 6287 deaths in 206 (+4.18%).