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Poland has recorded the largest decline in road deaths among European Union countries over the last five years. The improvement has come after a series of measures by the Polish authorities to improve road safety, which was previously among the worst in Europe.
Last year, 1,896 people died on Poland’s roads, the equivalent of 52 deaths per million inhabitants. That was 35% lower than the rate in 2019, representing the biggest decline among all EU member states.
The next biggest falls were in Lithuania (33%) – which had been equal first with Poland previously when preliminary data were released in March – Slovenia (33%), Belgium (27%) and Denmark (27%).
Road deaths have fallen in almost all EU countries since 2019, with a decline of 12% across the bloc as a whole. However, in three countries they have increased: Estonia (where they are up by 33%), Ireland (up by 22%) and Spain (up by 2%).
Although Poland has recorded the biggest decline, that came from a previously very high level. In 2019, it had the EU’s third-most-deadly roads, with 77 deaths per million inhabitants, behind only Romania (96) and Bulgaria (89).
Poland’s figure of 52 deaths per million inhabitants in 2024 is now the joint-seventh highest in the EU, alongside Hungary. Romania (78), Bulgaria (74) and Greece (64) had the highest death rates.
The safest roads are in Sweden (20), Malta (21), Denmark (24) and Luxembourg (27), while the figure across the EU as a whole was 45 road deaths per million inhabitants.
In its latest data release, the European Commission notes that Poland’s death rate has again declined significantly (by over 10%) in the first half of 2025, though it has not yet published the exact figures.
Poland has introduced a number of measures in recent years to improve road safety as part of a national programme for the period 2021-2030 that aims to reduce traffic-related deaths and serious injuries by 50%.
In 2021, the country changed the law to give pedestrians priority at road crossings. Previously, unlike in most European countries, drivers were not required to give way to pedestrians waiting at crossings, only to those who had already stepped onto the stripes.
The following year, new rules were introduced allowing the authorities to confiscate cars from drink drivers. The government also moved to regulate the use of electric scooters following a spate of accidents.
As a result of those efforts, in 2023 Poland won the European Transport Safety Council’s (ETSC) annual award for road safety. The council noted that road deaths in Poland fell by 47% between 2012 and 2022, compared to the EU average of 22%. Only Lithuania (60%) recorded a larger drop over that period.
Main image credit: Straż Pożarna (under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 PL)
Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.
