The number of suicides in Germany has dropped by half compared to 20 years ago, according to a new report released by the Federal Statistics Office on Tuesday. In 1982, 18,711 people took their own lives. By 2002, that number had gone down to 11,186, a drop of 40.3 percent. The number of fatal traffic accidents had also decreased by more than half during the last two decades. In 2002, traffic accidents took the lives of 6,842, down 55 percent from the 15,050 traffic deaths reported in 1980. Even though there were now some 55 million vehicles on the road compared to 34 million twenty years ago, the amount of serious road accidents has dropped by half.