In the first two months of 2023, 47 people died in traffic accidents on Austria’s roads. At the weekend, five road users were killed in an accident, and last week there were a total of nine fatalities, the Ministry of the Interior reported on Monday. From January 1st to February 26th, 2023 there were 47 fatalities on the Austrian road network – the same number as in the previous year. In 2021 there were 27 fatalities in the same period.
In the past week, four car drivers, three car passengers, a bus occupant and a pedestrian died in six traffic accidents. A serious traffic accident occurred on Saturday in the district of Zell am See, Salzburg, in which three people were killed. A 25-year-old car driver was driving with his two passengers (29 and 36 years old) on a state road when he left the lane on the snow-covered road and collided head-on with an oncoming Postbus. After the collision, the bus came to a standstill on the steep road shoulder. The two passengers died at the scene of the accident, the driver of the car succumbed to his serious injuries in the hospital.
Six people died last week on state roads and one each on a freeway, on an expressway and on a state road. The traffic deaths had to be lamented in Burgenland, Salzburg, Styria and Vienna. The presumed main causes of the accident were carelessness/distraction and inappropriate speed in two cases each, and overtaking and misconduct by a pedestrian in one case each. Two accidents were single-vehicle accidents and five fatalities were foreign nationals.
So far this year, most people have died in accidents in Lower Austria at the age of 13 – in the previous year there were eleven in the same period. There were seven fatalities each in Salzburg and Styria, five in Tyrol, four in Vienna, Carinthia and Burgenland. By February 26, there were two fatalities in Upper Austria and one in Vorarlberg.
