Road safety: too many deaths this summer on the roads of the Côte d’Azur

The remarks reported by our colleagues from Figaro are disturbing to say the least. According to the people they interviewed, the summer of 2023 will have been a disastrous period on the roads of the Côte d’Azur. All the indicators are thus on the rise, “the number of deaths is exceptionally high and unusual for the department” according to the prefecture of the Alpes-Maritimes. The head of the departmental road safety squadron of the national gendarmerie speaks bluntly of a “cataclysmic month of August”.

Inattentive vacationers?

53 people injured, 23 hospitalized, 13 died in the month of August alone, the figures have simply doubled in the space of a year. Worse still, 9 of the 13 road users who lost their lives died the week of August 15. By July, 19 people had already lost their lives. These figures may seem low to you, but they are a lot for a department which only concentrates barely 0.01% of the population of France. To give you an idea, 3,550 people lost their lives on French roads in 2022.

One could think, being the period of the year in which we are, that we owe these accidents to tourists who are too eager or too alcoholic. No way. The locals are the first victims. To top it off, “fatal accidents are more a matter of inattention than high speeds or driving under the influence of alcohol”, note our colleagues from Figaro. To meditate, it goes without saying.

It remains to know the figures for road accidents for the month of August to know if it is a generalized phenomenon or, on the contrary, localized in this department of the south of France, it is for soon. In July, however, the trend was downward at national level with 305 deaths, 33 less than in 2022, and also fewer serious injuries in July 2023 than in July 2022 (-7%, 1,558 injuries in total).

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