Madam, - Eddie Shaw, chairman of the National Safety Council, rightly rues the failure of Irish drivers to slow down and the Government's failure to invest in enforcement (Opinion, September 9th).
Madam, - Eddie Shaw, chairman of the National Safety Council, rightly rues the failure of Irish drivers to slow down and the Government's failure to invest in enforcement (Opinion, September 9th).
Unfortunately, I think he is magnificently naïve if he thinks changes in behaviour are easily delivered by making pleas and dire threats. Engineering the problem away is a much more practical and enduring solution.
In the early 1980s I spent many nights laboriously picking glass from the faces of young car occupants involved in accidents. Then came seat-belt legislation (poorly enforced in Ireland, I admit), airbags and better designed cars, and these injuries have practically vanished. The same can be said for many other awful injuries, often worse.
Meanwhile, there has been a very slight improvement in the state of our 98,000 kilometres of roads. A person is 12 times less likely to be killed on a dual-carriageway than on a two-lane highway. Yet the vast majority of travel in Ireland is on such roads.
Right turns (or their equivalent) off major roads are a thing of the past in most other developed countries, and this is definitely the case in the countries with the lowest road-death rates. And need I even mention the appalling road surfaces, dreadful road marking, awful signage and abysmal lighting? I actually think that Irish drivers are to be congratulated that the death rate has come down from 690 in 1969 to under 400 last year. This has happened, remember, over a period which has seen a massive rise in the number of cars on our roads and hundreds of millions more kilometers being driven annually.
Instead of trying to beat our drivers ever more mercilessly, demanding better behaviour and bamboozling them with illogical and quirky speed limits, we should be demanding that our Government and local authorities sort out the road system. Now. - Yours, etc.,
Dr STEPHEN CUSACK, Consultant in Emergency Medicine, Cork University Hospital, Cork.