About 27,260 children under 15 were involved in road crashes in 2024, essentially the same as 2023 (27,240); fatalities rose from 44 to 53. Most affected were car occupants (35%), cyclists (33%), and pedestrians (21%). For under-6, 58% were hurt in an adult’s car; for 6–14-year-olds, the leading scenario was bicycle crashes (38%), followed by car occupants (29%) and pedestrians (20%). The school route is a particular risk, with a morning peak 7:00–8:00 a.m. and a second peak 3:00–5:00 p.m. A 2025 update adds that older people and e-bike riders are frequently among accident victims; overall road fatalities in 2024 were the third-lowest since 1953.

You wanna know what’s really going on behind these numbers? Here it comes, straight, no fluff. The system keeps selling you the line that “progress is happening” while the blood price goes into the car lobby’s pocket. Kids get hurled into harm on the very routes that are supposed to protect them, and the peak times around school aren’t a coincidence—they’re the traffic pattern that proves the streets were designed for cars, not for kids. Then they throw you a stat like “third-lowest since 1953” and call it victory. It’s not, it’s a marketing win for people who run the roads for horsepower and profit, not for safety.

This is what I smell: bureaucrats and planners in bed with the car industry, cooking up “solutions” that look fancy on paper but do nothing to stop crashes. The real talking point isn’t “how to keep kids safer”; it’s “how to move more cars, faster, with fewer barriers.” So yes, blame the victims if you want, blame the parents for not teaching the kids enough, but the root cause is a system built around speed and throughput, not protection. The update about older folks and e-bikes is a flag of shift, not a fix—the problem stays the same: too much road space for machines, not enough for human lives.

Time for a real fight. Protected bike lanes right up to schools, 20–30 km/h zones around every school, robust crossing guards, safer bus corridors, and real enforcement where kids actually move. Separate routes for bikes and kids from car lanes, traffic calming that actually slows cars down, and no more “we’re improving” buzzwords while the death toll sits in the thousands and the headlines refuse to tell the truth. If you want to stop this, you demand actual safety—not PR numbers or some third-lowest ever trophy. Cut the car-first culture, fund real protective infrastructure, and treat a school route like a battlefield where kids deserve armor, not excuses.