<b>Comparative Analysis of Road Safety in the East Asian Region</b>

Road traffic crashes claimed 1.19 million lives in 2021, making them the leading cause of death among young people worldwide.The UN's Decade of Action for Road Safety (2021-2030) aims to halve these fatalities by 2030, yet research often overlooks low-and middle-income countries.The study highlights the urgent need for city-level analysis to address unique urban challenges, such as rapid urbanisation and inadequate infrastructure.Utilising data from 1975 to 2023, the research employs principal component analysis (PCA) and t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbour Embeddings (t-SNE) to examine the relationships between various road safety indicators.The findings indicate a significant decline in fatality and crash rates over the past 50 years, with notable improvements in road safety performance in Japanese and Korean cities.However, regions like the Taiwanese cities and Wilayah Persekutuan (the Federal Territories of Malaysia) have seen worsening metrics, partly due to higher motorcycle usage and underdeveloped public transport.The study underscores the need for improved data collection and targeted policy measures to further enhance road safety in the region.