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The Car Capital of the World Is…

Luxembourg.

As per the just-arrived Pocket World in Figures, from The Economist, the Grand Duchy has the most cars per 1,000 population: 647. (Also a bit improbably, Iceland is second).

Ethiopia claims the lowest rate, tied with Rwanda, with 1 car per 1000.

As an example of the sometime skewed relationship between car ownership and safety (as per Smeed’s Law), Botswana, which has just 42 cars per 1000 residents, is No. 1 in terms of traffic fatalities per 100,000 inhabitants (with 30).

The strangest figure to my mind was the “most injured in road accidents” column. The leader, by far, was Qatar, with 9,989 per 100,000 population. OK, so it also seems have to the most crowded road networks. But still, its injury rate (for a place where alcohol consumption is presumably lower) seems off the charts — its near neighbor, the UAE, for example, has just 183 (maybe the Qatari police are just really good at reporting).

Or is it something else? I do know that the Qataris are terrible when it comes to seat-belt wearing rates. Any other theories/facts/experiences?

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This entry was posted on Thursday, September 18th, 2008 at 12:31 pm and is filed under Cars, Risk, Roads, Traffic Wonkery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “The Car Capital of the World Is…”

  1. Darri Says:
    September 19th, 2008 at 7:04 am

    Unfortunately it is not at all improbable that Iceland is in 2nd place on the cars per capita list. People have nearly forgotten how to travel without a car, here in Iceland. Not sure if I can find any figures to back this up though…

    Darri

  2. Payal Says:
    September 22nd, 2008 at 9:34 am

    Hi Tom. I’m based in New Delhi, India, and am halfway through Traffic, which I’m finding fascinating (especially since I read it on my daily drive - but I have a driver, before you get alarmed!). As an aside, just wanted to mention, in Delhi we like to look on crossing the road as an adventure sport…just to give you a sense with which we approach the activity! It seems to keep us at least out of the top two of the road accident rate…!

  3. disgruntled Says:
    September 23rd, 2008 at 4:10 am

    Qatar is one of the few Gulf states to sell alcohol, I think, so it’s probably full of drunks from Kuwait & Saudi & expats stocking up on booze.

    Botswana’s roads are terrifying because cattle, goats and donkeys all sleep on the nice warm tarmac at night. The roads are empty and straight and reasonable well maintained, and there are long, long distances between towns. Although the police do a reasonable job of checking licences and enforcing speed restrictions, there’s a lot of places where cow v. car must be a common accident. There’s also probably more people per car (or minibus-taxi) than you’d find in the west.

    I’m sure cows kill more people in Africa than any other animal, man excepted…

  4. Hanne Says:
    October 1st, 2008 at 2:47 pm

    Just calculated car ownership in Iceland for a paper. As of 2008 there are 240.000 person vehicles (no bikes, vans, etc) for 312.000 inhabitants. More scary when you take out people who are under 17, the legal driving age in Iceland. There are 238.000 icelanders old enough to drive and 240.000 cars. Do the math.

    http://www.statice.is

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Traffic Tom Vanderbilt

How We Drive is the companion blog to Tom Vanderbilt’s New York Times bestselling book, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), published by Alfred A. Knopf in the U.S. and Canada, Penguin in the U.K, and in languages other than English by a number of other fine publishers worldwide.

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