The conference was organised by the Traffic Safety Association, in cooperation with the Interior Ministry and the Zagrebacka Pivovara brewery.
In proposed conclusions, experts underline the need to reduce the blood alcohol level allowed for drivers from 0.5 to 0.2 permille and to draw up a national strategy to reduce the societal damage of alcohol consumption, among other things.
Traffic Safety Association secretary Georg-Davor Lisicin said 52 persons per million were killed in road traffic in the EU in 2013, as against 86 in Croatia. The best ranked was Sweden with 28 casualties per million inhabitants.
Darko Grac of the Interior Ministry said that in the first 11 months of this year there were 50 fewer casualties than at the same time last year, down 15%. He said that over the past five years, one in four persons was killed in crashes caused by drunk drivers, one in four suffered serious and one in five light injuries.
Last year, drunk drivers caused one in eight crashes or 4,451 out of a total 34,021, resulting in 71 casualties, 582 seriously and 2,062 lightly injured persons, Grac said, adding that the number of accidents dropped by 13% in relation to 2012, the number of casualties by 38%, the number of seriously injured persons by 22% and the number of those with light injuries by 15.9%.
Grac said similar trends continued in the first 11 months of this year.
Tina Puhalo Grladinovic of the Zagrebacka Pivovara said a survey conducted by the brewery, covering 800 respondents, showed that 73% of adults drank alcohol, a majority of whom several times a year and 13.4% every day. Seventy-one percent were active drivers, including 36% who drove while under the influence at least once.