Road deaths were cut by just 3% in 2011, compared to 11% to the year before and Antonio Avenso, executive director of the European Transport Safety Council, recently said: Last year’s progress in reducing road deaths is quite far short of what we've seen in previous years in the EU.

'Combined efforts at both national and EU level must be stepped up, otherwise otherwise  the EU risks missing the target  of halving road deaths by 2020 compared with 2010,'  Mr. Avenoso added.

The 2012 PIN Award was  presented  presented  to Hungary for its efforts to improve road safety. Hungary has made impressive reductions in their number of road deaths, and is on the verge of halving their number of road deaths compared with 2001 levels. 

2011 was a mixed year in terms of developments in road safety in Europe. While several countries continued the positive trends of 2010 and 2009, others, including Estonia, Cyprus, Malta and road safety role models like Sweden, Germany and Finland, saw increases in the number of road deaths.

During the last year, good progress was observed in Norway with a 20% drop in road deaths, Latvia with 18%, Spain with 17% as well as Romania and Bulgaria with 15% each. 

'By improving road safety, impressive societal savings can be achieved. If the road deaths in the EU had been reduced by 6.7% in 2011(the percentage needed to move towards the EU target through constant progress) instead of 3%, the value of the additional savings  would have been almost EUR 2.1bn,' said Mircea Steriu, ETSC Communications Officer. 

'A lot of the important reductions in road deaths that were observed during the past decade can be attributed to the improvements that the PIN countries made in the way they manage road safety and their policy-making process,' said Richard Allsop, PIN Programme chairman. 

'A PIN study has shown that in every country, many elements of good road safety policy are in place, but there is  still scope for greatly improved procedures in many countries – so it is good that many countries are working on further steps to make roads safer for all users. It is vital that these efforts are maintained,' he concluded.