WHILE FATALITIES DIMINISH, INJURIES FLOURISH; WHAT IS BEHIND THIS TREND. Paper presented at the World Conference on Transportation Research, Lyon, 1992 Ezra HAUER Professor Department of Civil Engineering, University of Toronto Toronto, Ont. M5S 1A4, Canada 1. AN INTERESTING TREND Some time ago I have noticed that in Canada, ever fewer people die as a result of an "injury" sustained in a motor vehicle accident. This is quite clearly discernible in Table 1, below. Table 1. Year Number Killed Number Injured Killed/Inj ured Index 1965 4902 150612 0.0325 1.00 1970 5080 178501 0.0284 0.87 1975 6061 220941 0.0274 0.84 1980 5461 262977 0.0208 0.64 1985 4364 259189 0.0168 0.52 1990 3957 263139 0.0150 0.46 While in 1965 for every 100 persons injured, 3.2 had died, by 1990 this number diminished to 1.5. If the ratio is normalized to be 1 in 1965, by 1990 this "index" has diminished to less than one half. Naturally, the same kind of trend is evident when instead of counting persons killed and injured, one counts the number of fatal and injury accidents. In figure 1 I show the time series of annual fatal and injury accidents in Canada over the last 30 years. It is quite obvious that fatal and injury accidents evolved in time quite differently. While the number of fatal accidents in Canada has peaked around 1973 and declined thereafter (as in most developed countries) the number of injury accidents continued to climb unabated. Many draw comfort from the decline of fatalities during the last decade or two. The comfort is usually expressed publicly as: "we must be doing something right because fatalities keep going down". A glance at the count of injuries is less comforting. So it is puzzling why whatever we are doing right, works on the prevention of death without working with similar success on the prevention of injury. 1