Over the last few weeks a lot of media attention has been focussed on the “current” problems with Irish roads and in particular the high incidence of deaths.
Damien Blake’s post has given me the extra “push” to post this…
As some of you know I recently got a car – I didn’t really need one when I was living in the centre of Milan and hadn’t got round to getting one when I came back to Ireland.
Over the past few weeks I’ve been to Cork a few times as well as to Ennis. I’m not sure what my mileage is to date, but I probably do about 300 miles each weekend (my car uses Imperial – sorry!).
I’d almost forgotten how bad some drivers are. Speed isn’t the issue – stupidity and impatience is.
Stupidity – not indicating is my main bug bear.
Cars randomly stop and turn with zero warning. It doesn’t matter whether you are on a main road or a small country dirt track. You can never be sure what other drivers are thinking (in a lot of cases I doubt if they are thinking at all, but that’s another matter).
You’d think that indicators were a new invention!!
Impatience – It’s related to the stupidity in a lot of cases I suppose.
Typical scenario is where drivers simply cannot bear to wait in a queue and simply have to jump it. Of course the fact that jumping it means that they come straight out into a lane of traffic going the other direction doesn’t seem to matter to them. And how much time will they actually save? 30 seconds? A minute? Is it really worth getting killed for a 30 second “gain”?
What can be done?
The gardai need to be more proactive about dangerous driving. And by dangerous driving I mean literally that. Not the “wonderful” speed issue.
It’s far too easy for them to lay the blame entirely on speed.
If you are going down the M8 at 150 km/h you may be breaking the law, but you are less likely to hit anyone or cause an accident than the idiots who park on double yellow lines and obstruct other driver’s view, or the other idiots who stop randomly etc.,
Michele Neylon :: Pensieri
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“I’d almost forgotten how bad some drivers are. Speed isn’t the issue – stupidity and impatience is.”
You said it sister. My mantra is: “Speed Doesn’t Kill, Bad Driving Kills”. It starts some major, major flame wars, but I stand by it 100%.
Adam
🙂
Of course the more serious problem is when you combine the reckless idiot with speed – then you are truly in trouble!
Doing 70 miles an hour on some of the tiny little back roads is simply nuts. You might be able to do it if you know all the bends, but God help anyone coming against you!
Thanks for your contribution, Michele.
I agree with your comments (and Twenty’s, on his site) about stupidity. It’s bad driving behaviour, and by extension the bad drivers who do it, that we need to tackle. Vigilance is what is required.
On the speed issue; I would agree that Speed is not necessarily the cause of most accidents, but it is considered one of the most important factors in an accident that say if you’ll live or die.
Damien
While I agree that I am less likely to survive a crash if I’m hit by a car going at 100 km/h than I am by one going at 40 km/h I find that the media tend to focus solely on that issue.
It’s far too easy for the gardai to pull people for “speeding” than it is to catch them driving dangerously.
For example if you are going from Cork to Dublin the stretch of road before the new motorway is fantastic and is very easy for someone to “speed” on it. It’s also incredibly easy for the Gardai to catch someone doing so.
It’s not as easy for them to catch the morons who don’t indicate, who cut in front of you like nutjobs when trying to gain that extra 20 seconds in the morning ….
Inappropriate speed is a symptom of bad driving, therefore bad driving is always the root cause of “the carnage on our roads”. If I see that stupid phrase trotted out once more btw, I’m kicking ass.
Cullen was on Newstalk this morning getting lambasted by Ger Gilroy on a similar point to all this. A figure I would like to see is what are the fatality totals if you exclude road deaths where either alcohol was a factor or where the crash was an unclassified suicide.
It seems to me that a reasonably high proportion of the young single men who are killed in crashes are probably suicides, another problem that is generally ignored in this country.
I’m not sure whether it’s worth spending a lot of time distinguishing between speed and stupidity as primary causes. I’d guess that there’s probably a large number of specific things that need to be addressed: driver education, a historically pathetic road infrastructure, the country’s ongoing addiction to alcohol, a soaring suicide rate, etc. etc.
Stupidity is not the same thing as speed. The reason I take issue with any emphasis on speed is because it simply does not address the morons who fail to use their indicators, brake without warning etc.,
a fair point michele and well made:)
I’d argue though that, even if they’re not identical, they are at least related in the context of the wider issue of driver education.
I should probably come clean at this point that I don’t even know how to drive a car myself so I’m possibly talking out of my nether regions on this one:)
Anyhoo, I guess if you have to file it all under one heading then “stupidity” is as good a one as any. The impatience issue though seems critical and is very closely related to speed.
As an example, I was recently in a car with three generations of a family on a quiet country road. We narrowly avoided getting killed to bits by some idiot overtaking a tractor at around 80km an hour so he could shave 30 seconds off his journey from Recess to Linane.
Better roads, better driver education and better enforcement and sentencing for offences are the way to go I think. I’m not convinced that any of the increasingly graphic ads on the tele are making the blindest bit of difference. I’m also convinced, as mentioned above, that addressing two of the biggest scandals in the country – alcoholism and male suicide – would make a significant dent in those figures.
good blog by the way:)
I don’t know why you think suicide is such an important issue. The idiots who don’t use their indicators (ever!) aren’t suicidal and if you wanted to off yourself there are far simpler and more effective ways of doing it without actually going out onto a main road.
I’m not suggesting that suicide is the biggest issue with car deaths at all. I’d just be interested to see how much of a crossover there is between the two things.
As an example, there were 354 male suicides in ireland in 2005 (432 total). There were around 380 total road deaths in 2004. My first question would be how come we haven’t appointed a ‘czar’ for investigating why people are killing themselves in droves all across the country but that’s a bit off-topic I guess.
Dealing specifically with ‘the carnage on the roads’, the way the numbers seem to be going with the road deaths is that there’s a steady increase in incidents involving only one driver and a steady decrease in multi-vehicle collisions. I’m going largely off the figures reported in the Times – http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/motoring/2005/1221/3441615159MOT21P1LEAD.html
What this would suggest to me is that increasing legislation, enforcement and general awareness are having a positive effect in one area and don’t address the slightly mysterious rise of single vehicle incidents. Then you’re left with the question of what is responsible for the rise in single vehicle fatalities.
A significant amount of the single vehicle figures involve exactly the same group of people demographically as the biggest suicide risk group – men aged 20-30 – http://www.irishhealth.com/?level=4&id=10330
All i’m really wondering is how many of those single vehicle crashes are not a result of people losing control, being pissed or generally speeding but are rather direct suicides?
My guess is that it’s quite a lot. One of the reasons I’d suggest for people possibly taking this route rather than going for more “simple and effective” ways you mentioned is that, as the deaths aren’t reported as suicides, it doesn’t have the same social repercussions for the surviving family and communities.
I’m not trying to get bogged down on the suicide issue but am rather wondering more generally what are the separate issues that contribute to the ongoing ‘carnage on the roads’. One of the problems in terms of coverage and approach to this seems to be that people have a desire to reduce the whole area to one primary cause, be it speeding, driver recklessness etc.
My point would be that if you can successfully identify the various different contributing factors then you have a better chance of making the situation better.
For example, if alcohol is a factor in x number of road deaths then we should probably be looking at underlying issues to do with alcohol in this country to usefully address that particular section of fatalities. All the campaigns in the world about speed will have absolutely no impact on alcohol related incidents.
Similarly, better roads and education won’t make any difference to an amount of people who are just driving into walls because they want to end it all.
The overall point I’m trying to make is that in trying to reduce it to a single issue and making a massive fuss about it people aren’t usefully addressing the many, separate root causes of the problem.
I’d totally agree with you about the problem of incredibly stupid reckless drivers and the problem with assigning all of the causes of this primarily to ‘speed’. I think Justin made some good points on this over at taint a while ago when he was saying that he saw some much worse driving over in the states but it actually ended up being less dangerous because it was taking place on well built roads.
Anyhoo, it’s a complex issue obviously but that’s my two cents 🙂
toodlepip,
a
andrew, a very interesting post, and while it is an emotive issue, I have also suspected for some time that a number of the single vehicle crashes are delibrate, michele suggests there are easier ways, but we must remember that guns are not widely available in Ireland. If this is the case then the solution is very complex, the issues affecting young males must be addressed such as the emasculative exhoribant house prices which chain the subject to the lower rungs of maslows hierarchy, comdemned to a life of parental co-habitation in the pastiche of red brick white soffit legoland.
Have to agree 100%. People just have to start taking their driving more seriously.
After being nearly run off the road by an impatient woman a couple of months back, I had to write an article on my own blog about how I felt about this ridiculous situation – http://www.tomdoyletalk.com/2006/07/12/road-carnage-will-we-ever-learn/
With the ever increasing numbers of vehicles growing and using our road network in this country, coupled with more and more high powered cars and motorbikes being bought in Ireland, 10’000 more Mercs and 7’000 more BMWs registered in’05 than’04,for example,it is a truly shocking statistic that one person on average(at least) is being killed on our roads every day of the year. Why? and where should we lay the blame? Is it because there are bigger and faster motors than ever before? Is it the bad state of some of our roads? Is it the Governments fault?
The most incredible statistic, however, is that in 2004 36% of all fatal crashes involved only one vehicle, an increase of 3% on 2003. Single-vehicle crashes, involving no other road user, are most strongly associated with drink-driving and/or speeding. The shocking thing is that the penalty points system was introduced in ’03 and there was an increase in road fatalitys in ’04!! Speed kills, saying no to drinking and getting behind the wheel.. we all know the right message about staying safe on the road and what we should and should not do.
But by not doing either of these, are we protecting ourselves and our fellow road users on moral grounds because we know its wrong, and dont want to be responsible for seriously injuring or killing someone?
Or is it a fear of being caught by a speed camera , or being asked to “blow in the bag” on the roadside.
I reckon sadly , that the majority of road users, as you well know would be fall on the side of the latter.. We drive our cars like the way a badly behaved teenager acts, Crap attitude, cant be arsed to do it right, and sticks two fingers up to the world hoping never to be caught..
Here are the stats..
Year —– Death —– Injured
# 1994 —– 404 —– 10,229
# 1995 —– 437 —– 12,673
# 1996 —– 453 —– 13,319
# 1997 —– 472 —– 13,115
# 1998 —– 458 —– 12,773
# 1999 —– 413
# 2000 —– 322
# 2001 —– 366
# 2002 —– 343
# 2003 —– 293
# 2004 —– 379
# 2005 —– 398
# 2006 —– 367
# 2007 —– 336
It is obvious that the novelty of the penalty points system is now wearing a bit thin on most of us. The statistics show that the issuing of points to motorists is on the increase year on year. This may be due to increase of traffic ,granted, but this statistic should not be. The whole incentive of their introduction was to save lives wasn’t it? ,to make us slow down, to question our actions and take more care of ourselves, our passengers and our fellow motorists, to cut out the reckless behaviour…thus bring down the cold title of “The Death Rate” in the central statistics office. Every death is somebodys son, mother, father or daughter. In one way or another, everyone has, or will been hit with the impact of losing somebody or at least a person that we know from an accident.
Our cars are put through a rigorous NCT to make sure that our vehicles are of the highest safety standard mechanically, every little detail is tested both inside and out of the car. An Garda Shiocana do their upmost to try and curb the carnage by enforcing the point system, and enlisting drink driving blitz campaigns which are designed to deter offensive motorists from driving under the influence, where sadly, the message still simply does not get through to some.
So why are we left with this problem? These laws are in place to stem this totally unnecessary high loss of life for such a small country. Personally, and from a professional point of view, from spending most of my waking hours on the road I see somebody doing something “crazy” every single day. We can all relate to that statement. Its too easy to blame the bad state of some of our roads, or the “black spots” for the reckless destruction of lives, and of those who are left behind. It is within the power of every road user to change their behaviour thus bring down the accident rate and be safer. It is not up to The department of transport, they don’t drive our cars, we must stop shifting the blame and look toward ourselves and our driving habits. Patience is a virtue as the saying goes, and this is so true, get there late and so on…
The introduction of The Theory Test is a good and well overdue idea for new motorists. There is one destructive flaw in this system sadly. For example, the idea is to learn the warning signs and road markings and some common hazard situations, get tested on them through a pc and get 35 out of 40 correct and then you have a Provisional licence.
Straight away the system is letting down our learners by saying you don’t know all the answers but that’s good enough. Ask anybody who has just completed this test and passed it, what a corner is? and I can safely say that they will not know, or even be able to describe it. Most likely they will tell you its like a “bendy thing in the road” or whatever, A Corner is a 90-degree shift in direction where particular dangerous forces act upon the car, this is the kind of clarity I feel our beginners should have of the road before they are allowed on it to learn. There is no follow uo what so ever in the hidden dangers associated with warning signs, if you look very closly at the new Rsa rules of the road book you will find that there are even warning signs described incorrectly!!
From my experience learners are at times are safer than most other drivers, but lack of experience and the dangerous actions of others puts them in a very vulnerable situation.
Overtaking can obviously be really dangerous. We all see some terrible overtaking, The slow passes that seem to go on forever, the near misses that just got back to their own side of the road in time. Absolutely nothing wrong in doing this when executed with thought, anticipation and the right technique. Tailgating is all too common and it is not only intimidating for the vehicles in front, but highly dangerous and a domino effect of problems is created from doing this. Common sense should tell you that it is simply impossible to overtake when you cannot see the dangers because you’re too close to the car in front.For example.. Oncoming vehicles and possible right turns ahead with cars coming out of the junction turning left towards you!. It is a simple and efficient manouver when carried out from a safe distance back from the car you wish to pass, using this space build up acceleration before carrying out the overtake. This method gives you the upper hand in so far as you can see the road ahead clearly and gets you back to your own side in half the time. The average overtake takes 8 to 12 seconds (or more), would you drive down the wrong side of the road for this length of time? This method slashes that time thus keeping you much safer and out of harms way.
That is only one example but on this site there are various methods and motoring tips and techniques dotted throughout. We all can make our roads alot safer and it is within the bounds of everybody if we all woke up to our actions and used a litte common sense, paid more attention to each and every action that we make,and had some more patience with the more vulnerable drivers among us……
There will always be accidents,and people will forever die on our roads but education and the implementation of safe driving habits from the start of a motorists driving carrer is the key to changing the waste of lives young and old our roads claim.
Paul Mc Gettigan.