Is driving in Israel really that more dangerous than in the US?

As soon as we mentioned to our friends that we were making aliyah most people mentioned that driving in Israel is very crazy and dangerous. People would say “Israeli drivers are just crazy.” I never really believed it, especially after my first visit to Israel in 2003 where my very first experience was renting the car straight out of the airport and driving to a hotel in Haifa across half of Israel, at night, during which I realized that Israeli roads and signs are really well marked, nice, and visible. So I started to wonder is driving in Israel really that crazy? So far that I lived in Israel for 7 months and drove literally to every part of the country, I have to say that overall driving in Israel is the same as driving anywhere in the US. In comparison to driving in New York City Israeli driving here is really really nice. Except for in the center of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv most people don’t honk and yield to pedestrians just like in most parts of the US. Most people drive around the speed limit and observe the signs. Every once in a while you will meet a crazy nut who is cutting everyone off and speeding, but that happens everywhere. The roads themselves are much better than most of American and Western European roads (in my humble opinion, having driven across half of Europe and half of America).

So it made me wonder why do people, both new olim and natives, keep saying that Israeli drivers are crazy and how dangerous it is to drive in Israel. However no one that I have ever spoken to even knew what the statistics were. So I decided to do some math for myself.

The Israeli Car Accident statistics can be obtained from the National Road Safety Authority at this web site: http://pasimlev.mot.gov.il/RoadSafety/English/Statistics.htm

The US statistics can be obtained here: http://www.bts.gov/publications/ ...

All of the data is from 2004. Also, to be generally fair, I am comparing all of Israel to all of the US, even though Israel is really small and most of its population is concentrated in large cities, so it’s probably more accurate to compare it to a place in the US with a similar density, such as the NY/NJ area. But be that as it may I discovered that once again we were told a bunch of twisted information.

Here is what I found.

In 2004, in Israel:
1) There were 2.04 million registered motor vehicles
2) 428 fatal crashes
3) 480 fatalities
4) Estimated number of lives saved by the use of safety belts: 30
5) Population of Israel was 6,869,500

In 2004, in the US:
1) There were 243.24 million registered motor vehicles
2) 38,253 fatal crashes
3) 42,643 fatalities
4) Estimated number of lives saved by the use of safety belts: 15,434
5) Population of the US was 294,941,471

In order to compare the statistics I analyzed a few important ratios:

Vehicles / Population:
Israel: 0.296964845
US: 0.824705997

There are 2.77 times more cars in the US than in Israel relative to the population.

Fatal Crashes / Vehicles:
Israel: 0.000209804
US: 0.000157264

There were 1.334 times more Fatal Crashes in Israel than in the US relative to the number of vehicles on the road.

Fatalities / Vehicles:
Israel: 0.000235294
US: 0.000175312

There were 1.342 times more Fatalities in Israel than in the US relative to the number of vehicles on the road.

Vehicles / Fatality:
Israel: 4250
US: 5704

There are 25% more vehicles in the US that drive around without causing fatalities.

Estimated Safety Belts Saves / Fatalities:
Israel: 0.0625
US: 0.361935136

Strangely enough, only 6.25% of the fatalities in Israel could have been saved by the use of seat belts, where as over 30% of fatalities could have been saved in the US. This statistic is really strange. Either a lot more Americans don’t use seat belts or the way they estimate this number is really different and therefore it’s not a direct comparison.

Fatalities / Population:
Israel: 6.98741E-05
US: 0.000144581

There were 2.069 times more fatalities in the US than in Israel relative to the total population.

Another way of saying that is that overall you are twice as likely to be killed in a traffic related accident in the US than in Israel. Now you may say that more Americans have cars than Israelis, which is true (see ratio #1), however that doesn’t mean anything since many of the fatalities were pedestrians, bus riders (of which there are a lot more in Israel), bike riders, etc… And then keep in mind the population density issue that I mentioned in the beginning which makes this type of a comparison not totally fair. And finally the fact that there are less accidents in America per unit of cars completely makes no difference to your chance of being killed by one. What it does show that a lot less drivers of vehicles in the US create accidents, because there are 2.77 times more vehicles there and yet there are 25% less Vehicles per Fatality. But like I said that doesn’t affect your chances much. It is a sign to the Israeli driver that overall they create more fatal accidents than Americans do.

I think it’s worthwhile to compare the Israeli statistics to the NYC/NJ Area, but I am just too lazy to do it. May be someone who is that interested can post a comment here with their data for that area.

However, in general, I think that I made my point clear. Statistically, it’s not any more dangerous to drive or be driven over in Israel than in America. It’s roughly the same, if not safer in Israel (since so many people don’t drive). So feel free to come and drive.