If you think your van insurance isn’t as cheap as it used to be because of the UK having dangerous roads to drive on, think again. According to one league published by EuroRAP, the basis of recent industry article, the only place with safer driving conditions in Europe is in Finland.
Anyone who’s ever been to Barcelona or Rome will not be surprised to learn that, according to the league, Italy and *Spain were deigned the most likely places you were going end up having to make a claim on your van insurance policy as they finished predictably bottom of the pile, with France surprisingly mid-table (have you ever tried crossing the Champs Elysee?).
It is, however, unclear exactly how old the statistical data found on Wikipedia is. EuroRAP now has 20 member countries, according to its latest atlas, with over 50 contributory road safety organisations providing them with data, mapping over 180,000km that have been risk-assessed across the continent to bring you such statistics and a further 60,000 which have been star-rated. Finland is no longer a part of that survey and neither are their Scandinavian neighbours, Norway.
The current eurorap atlas (in BETA) is a 106-page report published online as a readable magazine. Rather than produce a league, it publishes individual countries in the assumption that, if you’re looking to gauge your ancillary van insurance green card rates against a target country you’re looking to possibly travel to, it is advisable to use the new European Road Atlas (linked above).
*Spain has, since the league table published on Wikipedia was last updated, now achieved the highest star rating of European single lane roads from those mapped in the current atlas published by the non-profit organisation, achieving a commendable 72% of its single-lane road network gaining three stars, or more. It was Spain’s much higher motorway accident rate that had pushed them to the bottom of the league previously.
Similarly contradictory to Wikipedia and the recent article, the new survey actually confirms GB as the safest place in Europe to drive for both motorways and dual carriageways based on risk-mapping data. One crucial bit of information for fleet managers produced by this latest report is that drivers are four times more likely to have a collision on a single-lane road than on a motorway.
If your organisation is safety conscious, has a high accident rate and feeling the pressure on your van insurance budget, it may be worth looking into using UK motorways, if they’re feasibly accessible, as a way to help drive down the risk factors you expose your fleet to.
And to put the record straight about France, they have the highest star-rated dual carriageways, with 95% rated three stars or more.
We have all seen the ‘appeal from the founders’ message on Wikipedia but their article about EuroRAP road safety is certainly in need of updating and a few [citation needed]’s.