A digitized version of the International Road Federation’s World Road Statistics (WRS) from 1963 to 1989.

The WRS first appeared in 1958 and is based on data compiled from official sources within national statistics offices and national road administrations in up to 196 countries. The WRS contain data on over 100 variables, including data on road networks, vehicle fleets, road traffic accidents, fuel consumption, and road expenditures.

Prior to 1990, the IRF yearbooks were published annually, each edition containing data from the previous five years. Since each variable appears in multiple editions, the series were compared across yearbooks to check for accuracy and to ensure that all revisions were recorded properly. Specifically, this digitized version contains the most recently published figures for each year. For example, the 1971 and 1972 data come from the 1976 WRS yearbook, the 1973 and 1974 data from the 1978 yearbook, and so on. The source for each observation is given in the data tables. It must be emphasized that the data are presented as published by the IRF. No editing other than the digitizing procedure described above has been applied to any variable.

Publication date:  January 8, 2003