Sir, – David Doran (“Safety on the roads”, Letters, January 16th) makes the argument that personal responsibility has a large role to play when it comes to road safety. This is a widely accepted viewpoint, and is indeed continually emphasised by agencies with a responsibility for road safety.
However, this approach just highlights how much we’ve accepted that when it comes to risk and responsibility, driving is in a special category that’s treated very differently from other dangerous activities, particularly when it comes to the dangers imposed on others. This is borne out by a study that’s just been published in the UK, where the respondents’ acceptance of risk was noticeably different depending on whether the question was framed around driving or around some other activity.
It also comes into focus when media organisations report on road collisions, where there’s still a strong tendency to focus on the car itself, rather than the driver. The reason that is usually given for this is that mentioning the driver implies a degree of culpability. But we don’t apply this to other people who are operating machinery in public, cyclists being an obvious example (“Bike hits pedestrian” anyone?).
Another glaring example of how this bias plays out is that in many areas, authorities can’t even be persuaded to protect the strips of space that are specifically designated for use by pedestrians or cyclists from encroachment by motorists. This seems to come down to the general acceptance that the awkward and contentious nature of storing cars when they’re not in use overrides the safety and convenience of other people.
Matt Williams: Take a deep breath and see how Sam Prendergast copes with big Fiji test
New Irish citizens: ‘I hear the racist and xenophobic slurs on the streets. Everything is blamed on immigrants’
Jack Reynor: ‘We were in two minds between eloping or going the whole hog but we got married in Wicklow with about 220 people’
‘I could have gone to California. At this rate, I probably would have raised about half a billion dollars’
So while there is always a place for personal responsibility in all walks of life, placing emphasis on this while there is so much that remains to be done to restrict the cause of harm seems back-to-front and, more seriously, appears to be ineffective in the face of ever-increasing numbers and sizes of cars on our roads. – Yours, etc,
DAVE MATHIESON,
Salthill,
Galway.
Sir, – Further to David Doran’s letter regarding personal responsibility and road safety, the tragedy is that children in Ireland are taught they have no such responsibilities from the very first day they attend school. On that day, and every subsequent school day, they see that it is perfectly acceptable for adults to irresponsibly park cars on double yellow lines and cycle lanes outside their school, despite those lines being there specifically to ensure the safety of children attending school, and despite there being perfectly legal parking available a few tens of metres further away.
They note that no garda or traffic warden attends a school during times where children are being delivered or collected. Many children also see that it is perfectly all right to drive while irresponsibly holding and using a mobile phone, on the way to and from school, endangering them and all other road users.
If children are being taught daily that adults have no responsibility for road safety, how can we expect them to grow up to be responsible road users? – Yours, etc,
RACHEL CAVE,
Bundoran,
Co Donegal.