1 May 2021

Driving in Singapore more dangerous than you may think: ValueChampion

Although Singapore has among the lowest road mortality rates per capita in the world, ValueChampion says that it is actually more dangerous to drive in Singapore than many other well-developed countries. In a blog post updating research from 2017, Anastassia Evlanova, Senior Research Analyst at ValueChampion Singapore notes that there were 12.13 fatalities per 100,000 motor vehicles in 2019, higher than the rate in Japan or Australia.

"(The) per capita basis for measuring road safety paints a misleading picture of how safe it actually is to travel by car in Singapore. Instead, driving Singaporeans should consider the number of car accidents and fatalities per vehicle to be a more accurate reflection of road safety," she said.

According to Evlanova, road mortality rates per capita are typically similar to fatilities per 100,000 motor vehicles in countries where car ownership is high, whereas fewer households in Singapore own a car. When the majority of Singapore residents rely on public transport, road mortality rates per capita cannot be used for apples-to-apples comparisons with the same statistic in other countries.

ValueChampion creates guides and tools that make it easy to pay off debt, choose the best financial products and services and tackle major life goals like buying a house and saving for retirement.

*ValueChampion's findings are based on statistics culled from publicly accessible and official reports and datasets published by the Singapore government, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Pew, the United Nations and the World Health Organisation (WHO). The company collected data on the number of car accidents, fatal accidents, human population, vehicle population and road mortality rates for countries around the world to analyse trends in the frequency of car accidents from 2010 to 2019.