Rep. Hwang Hee of the Democratic Party of Korea [provided by the lawmaker's office]
Rep. Hwang Hee of the Democratic Party of Korea [provided by the lawmaker's office]

Construction machinery such as dump trucks and concrete mixers killed 16 people per 100 pedestrian crashes over the past decade, data show — six times the fatality rate of passenger cars — prompting calls to extend safety oversight to public roads beyond construction sites.

Data submitted to Rep. Hwang Hee of the Democratic Party of Korea — a member of the National Assembly's Land, Infrastructure and Transport Committee representing Yangcheon-gap in Seoul — by the Korea Transportation Safety Authority and the Road Traffic Authority show that construction machinery was involved in 2,170 pedestrian crashes from 2016 to 2025, killing 347 people. The fatality rate of 16.0 deaths per 100 crashes was the highest among all major vehicle types.

That figure is six times the rate of 2.66 for passenger cars, 4.2 times the 3.81 recorded for vans, and 2.8 times the 5.62 for freight trucks. In 2025 alone, the rate climbed to 19.0 — the highest in a decade and 8.3 times the passenger-car rate of 2.3 that year.

The lethality gap becomes even starker when pedestrian crashes are compared with vehicle-on-vehicle collisions. Over the past five years, construction machinery was involved in 930 pedestrian crashes — roughly one-tenth the 9,532 vehicle-on-vehicle crashes — yet the death tolls were nearly identical at 147 and 154, respectively. The fatality rate for pedestrian crashes stood at 15.8 per 100, nearly 9.8 times the 1.62 recorded for vehicle-on-vehicle crashes.

The total number of construction machinery accidents fell 25.9%, from 2,510 in 2021 to 1,861 last year, while fatalities dropped at a slower pace — from 79 to 68, a 13.9% decline. As a result, the fatality rate per 100 crashes rose 15.9%, from 3.15 to 3.65.

Elderly people bore the brunt of the deaths. Of the 339 fatalities recorded over the past five years, 201 — or 59.3% — were aged 65 or older; last year that share rose to 72.1%, with 49 of 68 victims in that age group. School zones were not spared: 31 construction machinery accidents occurred in designated child-protection zones over the same five-year period, killing one person and injuring 43 others.

"Construction machinery accidents must be judged not by their frequency but by their lethality — the fact that a single crash so often ends in death," Hwang said. "Safety oversight must not be confined to the interior of construction sites; it must extend to every stage of travel on public roads." He added that because the movement of construction machinery is itself part of the construction process, a system is needed to designate routes and operating hours from the ground-breaking stage and to manage vehicles even when they are off-site.

Hwang said he is preparing to introduce an amendment to the Construction Machinery Management Act that would require each construction site to designate specific roads and time windows for machinery travel, and would use location data to systematically monitor vehicles operating beyond the site perimeter.


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