Casualty statistics indicate that pedestrians and cyclists account for about 20% of those involved in serious accidents in the WHO European Region. However, they are at disproportionate risk of death (or injury) compared with car users. For example, according to the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, an estimated 37% of the people killed in 1997 were vulnerable road users. The figures for road deaths in the European Union in 1998 (Table 1) show that pedestrians and cyclists have much higher rates of road deaths per billion passenger–kilometres than do car users. The figures in Table 1, however, tend to overestimate the risk to cyclists and pedestrians, as they are not corrected to exclude driving on motorways, which does not apply to pedestrians and cyclists. For example, a study in the Netherlands found that when a correction factor was introduced to take into account that the kilometres driven on motorways represent about one third of the distance driven in a car and that for those kilometres the risk of accidents is ten times less than on the rest of the road
network, the risk for cyclists was very close to that for car users.