Has progress in improving road safety come to a stop?

Analyses have been made in order to identify factors that influence the rate of change in the number of road accident fatalities and injured road users in Norway during the period 1979-2003. In particular, explanations were sought for the slowdown in the decline of fatalities after 1996. The analyses did not identify factors that successfully explain why the number of fatalities tends to drop markedly in some periods, but not in others. The variations in the rate of change are to a large extent random. Simple trendlines fitted to the data without making use of any explanatory variables describe long term trends almost as well as multivariate models.