Letters | What is the dollar cost of traffic accidents in Hong Kong?

In 2018, there were 15,935 traffic accidents causing fatalities and injury, broken down into 107 fatal accidents, 1,682 serious and 14,146 slight injuries.

The Transport Department does not publish “traffic accident damage only” figures – which it also collects but these have never been released to the public. One must ask why?

Overseas figures show that roughly one in four reported traffic accidents involve an injury, while the other three are “damage only”. Based on this overseas experience, in 2018 Hong Kong’s total number of reported traffic injury accidents and damage only incidents would be 63,740.

While the Transport Department has not published a dollar figure for the cost of a traffic accident, some countries have produced a traffic accident social cost, per death/injury, per accident.