Road Safety as a Test of Urban Governance: Why Uzbekistan’s Problem Is Not Urbanization, but How It Is Managed

CAP Uzbekistan Policy Brief No. 7, June 2026 by Alouddin Komilov

Urbanization and motorization do increase exposure to traffic risk, but they do not automatically produce high fatality rates. Fatalities rise when demand for expanding mobility is governed by fragmented institutions, non-integrated data, and road-investment systems that do not make safety a binding condition

Alouddin Komilov serves as Policy Analyst and Head of the International Political Development Unit at the Center for Progressive Reforms (CPR) and as Adjunct Assistant Professor at Webster University in Tashkent. His current research focuses on urbanization, road safety, and infrastructure reform in Uzbekistan, with an emphasis on developing practical, policy-oriented recommendations to improve institutional coordination and infrastructure governance amid rapid urban growth.

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Key Message:

• Uzbekistan’s road-safety crisis should not be treated as the unavoidable cost of urbanization. Urban growth and motorization increase exposure to risk, but they do not automatically produce high fatality rates. Road deaths rise when expanding mobility is governed through fragmented institutions, weak data systems, unsafe road design, and infrastructure investment that prioritizes movement over safety.

• The policy problem is therefore not urbanization itself, but the way urban mobility is governed. Uzbekistan already has institutions, financing instruments, enforcement mechanisms, digital capacity, and international support. What remains missing is an integrated operating system that connects these tools to one measurable public outcome: reducing deaths and serious injuries.

The Policy Problem: Urbanization Is Not the Enemy

Uzbekistan has entered a new phase of urban transition. As of April 1, 2026, slightly more than half of the population — 50.9 percent — lives in urban areas, reflecting a nearly 9 percent increase since independence.[1] This process accelerated after the abolition of the Soviet-era propiska (residence permit) system in 2020, which had long restricted internal migration to major cities. As administrative barriers to movement have eased, cities such as Tashkent and Samarkand have become stronger magnets for employment, education, services, and economic opportunity. The state’s official development strategy is more ambitious, calling for further raising the urbanization level to 60 percent by 2030,^[2] increasing the number of larger urban centers and extending master-planning coverage across settlements. The 2024 reform agenda also envisages an Urbanization Law, a longer-term urbanization strategy to 2040, and a regional public transport strategy to 2030. This means Uzbekistan is no longer navigating urban growth informally but is also trying to govern it as a national development project. Whether that project delivers productivity and livability gains will depend heavily on whether mobility becomes safer, more integrated, and less car-dependent in the country’s cities and growth corridors.

The Scale of the Road-Safety Burden

Road safety has become one of the clearest tests of state capability within the urbanization agenda. At the July 2025 presidential meeting on road safety, the government reported 9,364 crashes in 2024, almost 9,000 injured citizens, and 2,203 deaths. The same meeting cited around 20 million serious traffic violations and estimated that direct accident-related damage accounted for 0.4 percent of GDP.[3]  The Uzbek president publicly criticized the severity of the situation, noting that every fourth accident results in death and that the country loses, on average, six lives every day.[4] A broader 2024 UNICEF/UNECE review placed the socio-economic cost much higher, at 2.6 to 3.8 percent of GDP, and stressed that road crashes remain among the top five causes of death in Uzbekistan.[5] UNICEF further noted that, in Uzbekistan, road traffic injuries are the leading cause of death for children and young adults aged 5 to 29.[6] Taken together, these figures show that road safety is not merely a policing issue. It is also a public health, urban governance, infrastructure efficiency, and macro-social policy problem.

The central policy problem, however, is not urbanization itself. A common but misleading explanation is that Uzbekistan’s road-safety crisis is the inevitable result of urban growth. This interpretation is analytically weak and operationally dangerous. Urbanization and motorization do increase exposure to traffic risk, but they do not automatically produce high fatality rates. Fatalities rise when demand for expanding mobility is governed by fragmented institutions, non-integrated data, and road-investment systems that do not make safety a binding condition. In Uzbekistan, the decisive issue is not simply that more people live in cities or travel more frequently. It is that state capacity in road management, vehicle regulation, enforcement, emergency response, and urban transport has not kept pace with the scale and speed of mobility growth. The problem should therefore be defined not as “too much urbanization,” but as a governance failure within urbanization.

Available data support this interpretation. Urban residents now account for roughly half of the population, but the stronger pressure comes from rapid motorization. According to Uzbekistan’s National Statistics Committee, the number of vehicles owned by individuals increased from 4.02 million on January 1, 2024, to 4.73 million by October 1, 2025. In the first half of 2024 alone, 176,881 new motor vehicles were state-registered.[7] Tashkent illustrates the urban consequences of this trend.  In 2022, the Uzbek president was briefed that the capital had added 300,000 residents over five years, that more than one million people entered and left the city daily, that private transport accounted for 79 percent of trips while public transport served only 21 percent, and that up to 800,000 vehicles moved through the city each day.[8] This combination of private-car dependence, commuter inflows, and insufficiently developed public transport increases congestion, risk exposure, and pressure on urban road networks.

Yet exposure alone does not explain the fatality burden. Road deaths are shaped by where mobility growth occurs, how roads are designed, how speeds are managed, how pedestrians are protected, and how institutions identify and respond to risk. UNICEF’s summary of the Road Safety Performance Review found that state roads account for only 1.9 percent of Uzbekistan’s total road network but 35.9 percent of all crashes.  This points to the fact that the issue is not only urban streets, but a structural problem at the intersection of corridor design, settlement growth, and speed management. As urban and peri-urban areas expand outward, higher-speed roads increasingly function not only as intercity links but also as local access roads for pedestrians, buses, schoolchildren, and informal economic activity. In that context, a road can remain “efficient” from an engineering or throughput perspective while becoming systematically unsafe from a human-safety perspective. These are precisely the spaces where legacy road designs often collide with new patterns of urban expansion and daily mobility.

This is why infrastructure spending by itself is not enough. The Uzbek government has already invested heavily in infrastructure. By July 2025, 61 trillion soum have been allocated to road construction and reconstruction in recent years, 3.5 times the pre-2017 financing level. The same period saw major investments in automated enforcement, AI-supported decision systems and violation processing, 3,365 electronic tablets and body cameras for road safety officers, and a new Safe Road and Safe Pedestrian Fund expected to receive around 400 billion soums in 2025.[9] These investments matter, but the persistence of high fatalities indicates that spending and technology have not yet become a fully integrated safety-governance system. More money within an unchanged governance model will likely produce only partial returns.

Chart 1. Causal chain: how motorization becomes a road-safety crisis.

Three Governance Failures Behind the Crisis

Three structural weaknesses now limit performance. The first is institutional fragmentation. The 2024 UNECE road safety review called for concrete and measurable national targets and stronger support for the Republican Special Commission for Road Safety.[10] This recommendation aligns with the broader urbanization reform agenda, which separately defines the roles of state bodies in urbanization policy and prepares long-term planning instruments. The policy implication is that Uzbekistan does not lack institutions, but it lacks an effective operating system that aligns them around a single, monitored outcome. Without such an operating system, road safety remains divided among police enforcement, road construction, transport operations, public health response, and local implementation, with no single center of accountability for final results.

The second weakness is the absence of an integrated road safety data architecture. The CAREC crash-data review found that Uzbekistan still lacks a single crash database for automatic sharing among road safety actors.[11] As a result, crash reporting remains vulnerable to undercounting, fragmented analysis, and weakly targeted interventions. The same review notes that police crash forms do not record GPS coordinates, making it difficult to map high-risk locations with precision. In practical terms, policymakers may know that road deaths are occurring, but not with sufficient accuracy how many people die, where crashes happen, under what conditions, on which road types, at what speeds, and with what delay in emergency response. Importantly, the government has already demonstrated, through demographic statistics, that cross-agency digital integration is possible. According to the National Statistics Committee’s report, demographic indicators are now compiled through the electronic integration of the databases of the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The state, therefore, does not need to invent interagency data exchange from zero. It just needs to apply that capability to road safety.[12]

The third weakness is that transport and road investment remain insufficiently governed by explicit safety conditions. Multiple authorities share responsibility for roads, while the legal framework does not clearly define the “special authorized body.” Project design documents are reviewed by the Traffic Safety Service, yet national uniform road-design standards remain incomplete or inconsistently applied. The World Bank’s March 2026 transport project is significant because it not only finances civil works but also supports a National Multimodal Transport Strategy and broader sector reform. That logic should be generalized. As freight and passenger demand grow, Uzbekistan will indeed need more and better infrastructure. The World Bank has warned that road capacity would need to rise dramatically by 2030 to absorb projected freight growth. But this should not push the government toward a volume-first infrastructure response It should instead reinforce a design principle. In other words, every major road, urban transport, and corridor investment should be screened for safety performance at appraisal, during design, and after implementation. Otherwise, the state risks financing faster movement without consistently financing safer movement.

Policy Recommendations

Uzbekistan should address the road-safety crisis through three mutually reinforcing reforms. These reforms correspond directly to the three structural weaknesses behind the crisis: fragmented institutions, non-integrated data, and infrastructure investment that is not yet governed by binding safety conditions. The objective should not be to create another large bureaucracy, but to convert the existing road-safety architecture into a delivery system with clear authority, reliable information, and safety-linked financing.

Table 1. Three governance failures and corresponding reform package

First, Uzbekistan should establish a Cabinet-level road-safety delivery mechanism to overcome institutional fragmentation. The Republican Special Commission for Road Safety should be strengthened through a permanent Road Safety Delivery Unit operating under the Cabinet of Ministers. Its task should be to coordinate the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Ministry of Transport, Committee for Roads, Ministry of Health, Ministry of Economy and Finance, National Statistics Committee, and local hokimiyats around one measurable national outcome: reducing deaths and serious injuries.

This unit should not duplicate the work of existing agencies. Instead, it should set annual national, regional, and city-level targets; monitor implementation through a monthly dashboard; review high-risk corridors and cities quarterly; and link budget discussions to performance against agreed indicators. Each region and major city should be required to prepare a road-safety action plan aligned with national targets. Without this coordination function, road safety will remain divided between enforcement, road construction, transport planning, emergency response, and municipal implementation, with no single institution accountable for final outcomes.

Second, Uzbekistan should build a unified road-safety data architecture. The government should create a single interagency crash and exposure database linking police records, health-sector injury and fatality data, road-infrastructure information, transport data, emergency-response records, and statistical reporting. Every fatal and serious-injury crash should receive a unique case identifier, GPS coordinates, road-type classification, speed-environment information, vehicle and victim categories, and a 30-day health-status update.

The first stage should be piloted in Tashkent, Namangan, and selected high-risk state-road corridors where urban expansion, commuter flows, and high-speed traffic overlap. This reform is operationally realistic because Uzbekistan has already demonstrated cross-agency digital integration in demographic statistics through electronic data exchange between state institutions. A unified database would allow the government to move from general awareness of the problem to precise identification of where people are dying, why crashes are occurring, which road designs are most dangerous, and which interventions produce measurable reductions in deaths and serious injuries.

Third, Uzbekistan should make safety a binding condition for road, corridor, and urban transport investment. Every major road, street, public transport, and corridor project should undergo a road-safety impact assessment at appraisal stage, an independent road-safety audit during design, and a post-opening safety review after implementation. Access to central budget allocations, the Safe Road and Safe Pedestrian Fund, and international financial institution financing should be conditional on meeting minimum safety requirements.

These requirements should include protected pedestrian crossings, safe bus-stop access, lighting, refuge islands, speed management where settlements meet higher-speed roads, safe school-zone design, and provisions for public transport and non-motorized users. The guiding principle should be simple: no safety clearance, no financing. This is especially important as Uzbekistan expands transport capacity to absorb growing freight and passenger demand. The country needs better infrastructure, but it should not finance faster movement without financing safer movement.

Implementation Sequencing

Implementation should proceed in three phases.

During the first 12 months, the Cabinet should establish the Road Safety Delivery Unit, approve national and regional reduction targets, launch the unified crash-data pilot, and require safety audits for all major new or reconstructed road projects. The Safe Road and Safe Pedestrian Fund should be used to treat a short list of high-risk corridors, beginning with locations where fatal and serious-injury crashes are already concentrated. If safety is not included in the terms of reference for a road or urban transport project, the project should not pass design review.

During the next one to three years, cities with populations above 100,000 should adopt Safe System urban mobility plans. These plans should combine blackspot treatment, corridor-level speed management, pedestrian protection, parking regulation, bus-priority measures, and safer access to public transport. The most important budget rule should be direct: no city should receive major road capital allocations without a published road-safety action plan and quarterly reporting. This keeps the reform politically realistic. Uzbekistan does not need a new doctrine; it needs to attach safety conditions to money that ministries and hokimiyats already want.

During the three-to-five-year period, safety performance should become a formal criterion in national road-design standards, procurement scoring, contractor evaluation, and municipal performance assessment. Local road agencies should not be assessed only by kilometers resurfaced or roads widened. They should be assessed by reductions in deaths and serious injuries on treated corridors, the number of upgraded crossings, improved bus-stop safety, speed compliance around schools and settlements, and response times to citizen-reported hazards.

By 2028, Uzbekistan should aim for a measurable reduction in police-reported road deaths from the 2024 baseline. By 2030, the target should be more ambitious, with sharper reductions on treated pilot corridors. If improved 30-day reporting raises the baseline, the government should recalibrate targets transparently rather than conceal the change. Better data may initially make the problem look worse, but that is a necessary step toward credible governance.

Conclusion

The policy choice for Uzbekistan is not whether to continue urbanizing, expanding transport networks, or supporting economic connectivity. These processes are already underway and are central to the country’s development strategy. The real choice is whether they will be governed by fragmented bureaucratic routines or by an integrated system that treats road deaths, congestion, land-use change, public transport, and urban design as interconnected outcomes of state capability.

The evidence is already sufficient to act. Uzbekistan has a growing urban population, a rapidly expanding vehicle fleet, severe road-safety losses, dangerous concentrations of crashes on high-speed roads, weakly integrated crash data, and infrastructure investment systems that do not yet make safety a binding condition. The country also has the tools to respond: Cabinet-level authority, digital-government capacity, dedicated road-safety financing, international development support, and an active urbanization reform agenda.

A realistic reform path does not require creating a new ministry or waiting for perfect data. It requires a compact coordination center, a single trusted national dashboard, disciplined use of road-safety financing, mandatory safety conditions for major investments, and a shift from reactive traffic control to safety-led urban governance. If Uzbekistan aligns urbanization policy, transport governance, and road-safety delivery now, it can reduce fatalities, improve mobility, and make reform visible in citizens’ daily lives.

Road safety should therefore be treated not as a secondary technical issue, but as one of the clearest tests of whether Uzbekistan’s urbanization is being governed effectively. Safer roads would not only save lives. They would demonstrate that the state can manage the social consequences of growth, convert infrastructure spending into public value, and build cities where mobility supports development rather than undermining it.

[1] Demographic Situation in the Republic of Uzbekistan for January–March 2026, Stat.uz, April 27, 2026

^[2] Nimmo-Bell & Associates, Uzbekistan pushes for increased urbanization of less-populated cities, April 20, 2020.

[3] Additional measures for ensuring road traffic safety determined, President.uz, July 9, 2025.

[4] President Mirziyoyev calls for urgent reforms as road accident statistics remain alarming in Uzbekistan, Kun.uz, July 9, 2025.

[5] UN Road Safety Performance Review: Road infrastructure in Uzbekistan needs to prioritize the safe movement of people, UNICEF, March 28, 2024.

[6] Ibid. 5

[7]  Which regions of Uzbekistan are the leaders in the number of cars owned by the population?, Stat.uz, February 2, 2024.

[8] Development of Public Transport in Tashkent Discussed, President.uz, January 1, 2022.

[9] Additional measures for ensuring road traffic safety determined, President.uz, July 9, 2025.

[10] Road Safety Performance Review Uzbekistan, UNECE, 2024.

[11] Uzbekistan Road Crash Data Review and Reporting: Status and Recommendations, CAREC, March 2025.

[12] Ibid., 11.

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