In 2024, a staggering 19,940 people lost their lives in road crashes across the European Union, according to the European Commission’s latest road safety statistics. Behind each number is a family, a community, a life permanently altered. While the European Union continues to make gradual progress, the pace of change still underscores a persistent challenge. Rather than treating this number as a routine statistic, the growing Vision Zero movement highlights the need to rethink how we manage road safety across Europe.
Cities and national governments throughout the EU have embraced the goal of eliminating traffic fatalities and serious injuries. Achieving this goal requires more than ambition. It requires a shift toward proactive solutions in how we measure and manage road safety.
What is Vision Zero?
Originated in Sweden, Vision Zero is built on the principle that no loss of life is acceptable. At its core lies the Safe System Approach, which recognizes that human error is inevitable and that responsibility for preventing fatalities extends beyond individual road users like drivers, cyclists or pedestrians to infrastructure designers, policymakers, and transport planners. This approach includes designing roads that anticipate common mistakes, managing speeds to reduce impact forces, protecting vulnerable road users, and continuously monitoring safety performance.
Looking across different European countries, trends in road deaths and safety improvements vary (European Commission, 2026). Belgium has seen a moderate decline in road deaths in recent years, with a decrease of 27% since 2019, yet fatality numbers remain above the reduction target. France continues to work toward its goals through enforcement and monitoring programs, though with 48 fatalities per million inhabitants in 2024, they remain above the EU average of 45. Finland is one of the best performing countries and has steadily reduced road deaths over the past decade, earning recognition for long-term improvements. These variations highlight why cities in each country are seeking more proactive, data-driven strategies to identify risk and prioritize interventions before crashes occur.
The European Union has set an interim target to reduce road deaths and serious injuries by 50% by 2030, with the ultimate ambition of reaching near-zero fatalities by 2050. To meet these targets, Vision Zero requires a structured and consistent data-driven approach.
Challenges cities face
Despite strong political commitment, many cities face challenges when translating Vision Zero into practice. Some of the common obstacles include:
- Limited resources: cities must carefully choose where safety interventions will have the greatest impact.
- Difficulty prioritizing locations: without reliable risk indicators, it can be hard to know which intersections need urgent attention. Accidents at intersections represent roughly 43% of total road injury accidents and 21% of fatalities in the EU (Simon et al., n.d.).
- Measuring progress: since serious crashes occur rarely, relying only on crash data makes short-term progress hard to track.
Why crash data has limitations
Crash data remains an essential element of road safety management because it shows where collisions have occurred and provides measurable insight into the problem. However, its main limitation is that it shows harm only after a collision has already taken place.
By the time a location is statistically identified as “high risk”, numerous people have already been injured or killed. Serious crashes are statistically infrequent compared to daily traffic interactions, which means that identifying meaningful patterns can take years. In the meantime, hazardous conditions may persist unnoticed. Minor incidents and near collisions often go unreported, leaving gaps in understanding how risk develops in specific locations.
In addition, crash reports typically describe outcomes rather than the underlying behaviors that contribute to collisions. They may record that a crash occurred at an intersection, but they rarely capture repeated patterns such as failure to yield, frequent hard braking, or red-light conflicts. Without insight into these precursors, interventions may address symptoms rather than root causes.
If Vision Zero aims to eliminate fatalities, waiting for crashes to accumulate before acting contradicts the goal. To better anticipate risk, cities need to complement crash statistics with proactive indicators of unsafe interactions.
How Near-Miss detection supports Vision Zero implementation
To move from reactive to proactive road safety management, cities need insight into risk before collisions occur. Near-miss detection identifies high-risk interactions: moments when a collision almost happens but is narrowly avoided. These moments reveal weaknesses in road design, traffic flow or user behavior that traditional crash data may not capture.
With advances in sensing technologies such as LiDAR, and trajectory-based monitoring, road users can be tracked in real time. By reconstructing movement patterns, it becomes possible to detect and quantify traffic conflicts using established safety metrics such as:
- Time to Collision (TTC): the estimated time remaining before two road users would collide if they continued on their current paths.
- Post Encroachment Time (PET): the time difference between one user leaving a conflict point and another entering it.
- Behavioral risk indicators: patterns like sudden braking, unsafe turning movements, failure to yield or red-light conflicts.
These near misses occur much more frequently than serious crashes, generating richer datasets. When integrated into broader smart city traffic monitoring systems, near-miss analytics enables transport authorities to identify conflict hotspots with precision, assess intersections based on actual levels of risk, allocate resources to the locations where safety interventions are most urgently needed and to evaluate the effectiveness of implemented measures over time. Additionally, the structured near-miss insights can support evidence-based funding decisions and planning, ensuring that investments are directed toward interventions with measurable impact.
Solutions such as Flow Analytics by AGC include near-miss detection capabilities, enabling cities to monitor risk in real time and support proactive safety measures. Instead of relying only on past crash records, cities can monitor risk in real time and support Vision Zero through predictive analysis.
This shift represents a necessary step if Europe wants to meet its 2030 road safety ambitions. Because the path to zero does not start after a collision. It starts by identifying risk before impact.