13,768 people died in accidents on South African roads in 2009. This is according to data from the Road Traffic Management Corporation provided in a reply to a parliamentary question by the Minister of Transport. This is slightly down from the 13,873 recorded road accident fatalities in 2008.
KwaZulu Natal was the province with the highest number of deaths in 2009 (2,855), followed by Gauteng (2,485), Mpumalanga (1,764) and the Eastern Cape (1,543).
There were 10,343 road accident fatalities in 2010 up until September - the last month for which statistics were available. See graph and tables below.
By comparison 2,222 people were killed in road accidents in the United Kingdom in 2009, and 4,152 in Germany the same year.
Table 1: Number of Fatalities per Province per Month 2008