Every day four people, on average, suffer serious injuries on our roads. It’s a shocking statistic. Two of them would typically be passengers in a car, one would likely be a pedestrian and one other a cyclist. They spend on average 10 days in hospital, mending their shattered bodies and only starting to come to terms with the psychological trauma that may stay for life.
The tragic stories of the far too many people who lose their lives on our roads are well reported, but an often-untold story about road safety in Ireland has been the dramatic increase in such serious injuries over the last 10 years.
While road deaths increased in 2022 and 2023, these are still significantly below where they were in 2014.
However, over the same decade serious injuries on our roads, as reported by gardaí, almost doubled. Hospital admissions show slightly different and larger numbers, but the pattern of increasing serious injuries is the same, with a particular increase in serious injuries involving cyclists.
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We are an outlier compared to similar and neighbouring countries, who have not seen the same trend of increasing injuries while fatalities come down.
It is hard to be certain what is behind the changing pattern. The 20 per cent rise in our car fleet over the last 10 years does not help, nor does the fact that our average daily commute has continued to increase to 16.8km per person each day. And our cars are getting bigger and quicker, so when they hit you, they do more damage.
Over the last two years, the Road Safety Authority has published a number of research reports which help in analysing what is happening.
One of the clear differences emerging is that while three-quarters of roads deaths are occurring on rural roads, most of the serious injuries happen on urban roads. Within that total, 90 per cent of pedestrian injuries are in urban areas, while the figure for cycling is 80 per cent - with half of those happening in the Dublin area.
We need to address the rural and urban safety issues urgently. The introduction of lower default speed limits by local authorities right across the country, due to start next week, should help in reducing the fatality and casualty lists.
Transport Infrastructure Ireland is still promoting roads-based solutions to solve our traffic problems
However, we will still have a particular problem in urban areas, due to the complex interaction between many different vulnerable and motorised road users.
That complexity requires a variety of measures to be taken at the same time. We have just started trialling new road safety cameras. That has to be followed up with new policing methods, so that traffic rules are more easily enforced.
We also need to change the ethos of Transport Infrastructure Ireland, which is still promoting roads-based solutions to solve our traffic problems. That approach will only create more car dependency and gridlock and an inherently unsafe, expensive and unsustainable transport system.
The international evidence is increasingly clear that the best way to protect the most vulnerable road users – such as our youngest and oldest citizens, pedestrians and cyclists – is to provide proper footpaths, easier road crossings, better junction designs and segregated cycle lanes.
Yet this approach is still widely contested. Even the simplest traffic management measures are increasingly caught up in our courts, adding long delays and bloated budgets to projects which are the best way of reducing injuries on our unsafe roads.
We have also found it difficult to provide these new facilities in a way which works for people with disabilities. We have to design “access for all” as a first principle in all our transport infrastructure, while recognising that those with a disability are often the most vulnerable and the most disadvantaged by the car-dominated system.
The political system is, however, more attentive to the wider public opposition that inevitably comes if any road space is to be re-allocated for cycling or pedestrian needs.
At the completion of the recent Programme for Government, one person involved was reported as saying “there won’t be as many cycle lanes built, that’s for sure”. As if road safety were not an issue, as if we could ignore climate change, as if we don’t all lose out under the gridlock that the car-dependent system will inevitably bring.
Equally worrying was the promise in the Programme for Government for local active travel projects to be delivered directly from the Department of Transport rather than through the National Transport Authority.
This is a recipe for returning to a mechanism of political patronage. There is a real risk that scarce resources will now go to where there are most votes for the Government, rather than where it is most needed.
A lot of good work has been done in recent years and our engineers and planners have learned from experience, but we now need to build new facilities with much greater speed and at a much lower construction cost.
The numbers of fatalities dipped slightly last year, but we know that every one of the 174 lives lost was a terrible tragedy for each family and community. We don’t yet have the full figures for serious injuries in 2024, but we need to start focusing on that statistic in the same way as we do on road deaths.
It is not inevitable that so many people will be killed or maimed for life. It is a political choice.
Eamon Ryan is a former Green Party politician who served as minister for the environment, climate and communications and as minister for transport
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