According to the spokesperson for the Rassemblement national, it is neither speed nor the consumption of alcohol or narcotics that are the main causes of road accidents in France, but the infrastructures (roads, signs, barriers, etc.). However, this is false. We explain to you.
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The government created Monday, July 17 the offense of “road homicide”, to characterize a homicide after a road accident, in the middle of the period of departure on summer vacation. However, according to Sébastien Chenu, spokesperson for the National Rally, the drivers are not the first to blame in this type of drama. “We must have an infrastructure renovation policy which must be significanthe says on RMC, Since I remind you that the main cause of accidents, 30% of them, is related to infrastructure”
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This statement is false. The main cause of accidents is what is called “human factors”, whether it is the behavior of the driver: speed, dangerous overtaking, refusal of priority, or his condition: consumption of alcohol or drugs, malaise, carelessness, etc. These factors are involved in 92% of road accidents according to the latest figures from ONISR, the National Interministerial Observatory for Road Safety.
Speed responsible for just under one in three fatal accidents in 2021
As for roads, barriers, traffic signs, they are actually responsible for a third of accidents, as Sébastien Chenu says, but they therefore come far behind human factors. Especially since an accident rarely has a single cause, so there are often several factors combined in the same collision. Thus, again according to the latest figures from ONISR, only 1% of accidents are due solely to a fault in the infrastructure. On the contrary, 15% of collisions are caused by a mixture of human factors and infrastructure factors. By comparison, 46% of accidents are caused solely by the behavior or condition of the driver.
This is even clearer when we look at the fatal accident figures from ONISR. The leading cause of fatal accidents in 2021 is speed: just under one in three accidents. But the causes of fatal accidents change according to the type of transport mode. Excessive or inappropriate speed is the first culprit among motorbike or car drivers. For scooters, on the other hand, it’s alcohol, and it’s inattention among pedestrians.