General Road and Highway Discussion

[Pheidippides]

Plus, something doesn't feel right about the fact that they are looking at fatalities on the regional road network (~700km), but using the entire regional population as the denominator.

I think I figured out what bothered me about the use of the entire region as a denominator.

If you are going to use all of the population of a geographic area in the denominator then you need to use all of the fatalities in a geographic area in the numerator; not just the ones on regional roads (I understand that the region only has control over its roads, and there is no way of knowing the true size of the population that uses regional roads so this was the best approximation they could do, but I think to most people who hear this reported would be misled because they don't understand the differentiation between a city road and regional road).

According to public health, deaths to Waterloo residents (not deaths occurring in the region on regional roads) resulting from "land transport" injuries occurred at a rate of 4.8 / 100,000 in 2012 (where "...land transport collisions are predominantly represented by motor vehicle collision deaths, but also include deaths in collisions involving other modes of land transportation such as trains, street cars and animal-drawn vehicles...").

So that is higher than Sweden's rate in 2012 and I think that is excluding cyclist and pedestrian deaths.