58,000 people died on Chinese roads in 2015: report

Beijing: Chinese roads saw 58,000 deaths in more than 180,000 traffic accidents in 2015, authorities said, adding that poor enforcement of traffic laws still posed a threat to road safety in the country.

Deaths on Chinese roads have dropped from more than 107,000 in 2004 to 58,000 in 2015, according to a report posted on Wednesday on the official website of the National People's Congress (NPC), the Chinese parliament.

The number of road accidents declined from 518,000 to 188,000 during the same period, it said. Fatal road accidents are a serious problem in China, where traffic regulations are often flouted.

The country's frequently overcrowded long-distance buses are prone to accidents, with individual incidents regularly causing dozens of deaths.

Traffic law violations caused almost 90 percent of the road accidents where people died or were injured in 2015, with the total number of such infractions reaching an astonishing 442 million, it said.

The report also highlighted overloaded trucks and poor road and safety facilities in rural areas as two major contributors to the high frequency of road accidents.

The number of traffic accidents dropped from 197,000 in 2014, while deaths were about the same with 58,523 recorded by the National Bureau of Statistics.

A World Health Organization report in 2015 claimed that official Chinese statistics seriously under-represent the actual number of road deaths.

The study estimated that 261,367 people died in 2013, almost 4.5 times more than the official number for the same period.