Expert warning: extreme speeding is this year's most dangerous trend on Latvia's roads

Oskars Irbītis, who heads the Road Traffic Safety Directorate's project studying severe traffic accidents, told TV24's programme "Cilvēks. Ceļš. Drošība" that the leading risk factor behind serious crashes in Latvia shifts from year to year. Based on several years of analysis, he says this year's data points most clearly to extremely high driving speeds.

A different risk factor each year

According to Irbītis, dangerous overtaking stood out as a key problem in 2024, while failure to wear seatbelts was the dominant issue in 2025. This year, statistics and individual crash analyses show a strong dominance of very high driving speeds, which significantly raise the force of impact and the risk of severe consequences.

Cars breaking into as many as three pieces

As an illustration of this year's trend, the expert cited a recent crash in Jūrkalne, where a car was broken into three separate pieces in the collision. Irbītis stressed that the vehicle's speed at the time was extremely high, adding that this is far from the only case this year in which vehicles have effectively disintegrated after a severe crash, scattering wreckage across the road.

Caution against drawing hasty conclusions

Despite this year's pronounced trend, Irbítis cautioned against drawing firm conclusions from a single year's data. He pointed to the experience of Finland and Norway, where severe-accident research has been conducted for a long time and where specialists emphasize that reliable, lasting trends only emerge from data spanning several years. He noted that Latvia's three years of available data are still not sufficient to draw final conclusions about long-term changes in road safety, but this year's clear link between high speed and severe crashes is a signal that deserves increased attention.