General Road and Highway Discussion

[Pheidippides]

I don't think the problem is in using the entire population as the denominator or just fatalities on regional roads as the numerator.  That seems most consistent with the Swedish numbers to me.  

I will have to disagree. Sweden is measuring all of the deaths on all of its roads so it makes sense to use the total national population as the denominator. The region is only measuring collisions that resulted in one or more death on regional roads. The actual unit of measure is different (fatalities vs. fatal collisions).

Also, regional roads make up 20% of the road network within the region (the rest being city, province, or private) and 60% of the total length of those regional roads is in rural areas (defined arbitrarily as being in the four townships). On top of that 11% of the region's population is rural. So they are looking at a fraction of the road total road network, and the largest portion of the regional network is used by the smallest portion of the population.

If you look at the urban parts of Sweden the rates are around 1.5/100,000, the rural areas are around 6.7/100,000 for 2016.


Also, I checked the public health definition.

Fatalities from "land transport" injuries includes:
Motor Vehicle Collisions (Traffic and Non-traffic)
Pedestrian (Motor-vehicle Traffic only, Motor-vehicle Non-traffic, Other, non-motor vehicle)
Cyclist (Motor-vehicle Traffic only, Motor-vehicle Non-traffic, Other, non-motor vehicle)
Public Transportation (Bus occupant, All railway train or railway vehicle transport accidents, Street car occupant)
Off-road transport accidents (Both traffic, non-traffic including drivers, passengers and unspecified occupants of snowmobiles and Other all-terrain or off-road vehicle..

Where a traffic accident is one that occurs on a public highway/road, and a non- traffic accident occurs in another place other than a highway/road. 

So it actually would include pedestrian vs. cyclist, or pedestrian vs. pedestrian, or cyclist vs. cyclist fatalities (however rare), but also includes other modes of transport and locations that would be beyond the traditional road network. So probably a slight overestimation, but better than what was presented.