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..considering today's indo i thought you might find this interesting.. it originally appeared on an irish motoring website a little while back;
"A coincidence of population size and the fatality rate on Irelands' roads means there's just the right amount of "carnage" to make the national news headlines every day.. as the country slips into a moral panic on the issue we try to find some perspective.
Travel has always been precarious. Our forefathers drowned, came off horses or fell prey to bandits and wild animals. The motorcar opened up a new era of personal mobility, but the risks in getting about are nothing new.
Today we travel more than any time in our history. A booming economy, lack of public transport and poor planning mean in Ireland we cover the highest average personal mileage in the EU.
We do so on an inadequate and outdated road network which relies heavily on regional roads that are often little more than muck-sodden trenches. Non-motorway primary routes still persist with a conceptually dangerous and hopelessly inefficient design, where week on week drivers will be lucky to average 60km/h. If we want safer roads the first thing we need to do is build them.
Meanwhile untrained, untested and failed learner drivers are allowed unlimited access to this road network, incredibly even to motorways. Young drivers can now afford to get mobile, indeed the economy demands that they do. But the State still shirks its responsibility to ensure that they are in any way competent to do so.
In 1975 586 people died on Irish roads. Last year the total was 399. The death rate per 100,000 population is currently around midfield compared to our EU neighbours, and is arguably much lower than one would expect given the above. The figure of 399 is up about 5% on 2004, but the number of registered vehicles is up about the same amount. The economy, population and total annual mileage continue to grow.
Media treatment of the latest NRA Survey of Free Speeds has been bizarre. Anyone taking the trouble to actually read the survey would see that for the most part speeds are not unreasonable. The 85th percentile speed in most instances is pretty close to the speed limits, which is as it should be. Anomalies such as the high proportion of HGVs breaking the 80km/h motorway limit are explained by the fact that the 80km/h limit is significantly lower than that recommended by the Review Group, while the blanket 80km/h limit on regional roads has been imposed inappropriately (though predictably) on roads such as the old N1.
To be fair to the NRA the report makes no explicit connection between the speeds recorded and the causes of accidents on various roads. Indeed they cannot provide any robust information on the causes of accidents because the information doesn’t appear to exist. The connection has been made by the popular media.. every road death is now caused by a speeding drunk.
All this isn’t to say that we can’t make our roads safer, but rather that the debate has descended into a moral panic. Over-simplification is dangerous. The UK had the safest roads in the world until the initiative was lost to a politically inspired “war on speed”. Years of thoughtful work by engineers, accident investigators, educators and the police took a back seat to a dogma.
The publicity onslaught is now beginning to soften-up the Irish public before the introduction of a draconian surveillance camera network. All sorts of statistics will be thrown about with no context, so here’s a stark statistic that you won’t see quoted too often; in the year that speed limits were reduced on 90% of the Irish road network, road deaths rose by 5%."
