The best road safety device is your brain

THIS is not a column I have any wish to write, and I would be very glad indeed if I did not have to do so. Nevertheless, it is one I feel is necessary, because we need to talk about something we thought was receding into the past, namely carnage on our roads.

On Tuesday evening at 7.25pm, Darragh Dullea and Cillian Kirwan, two young men in their late teens, became the 31st and 32nd people to die on our roads this year. Think about that – 32 people in 50 days. That’s one person dead every 38 hours. If it were to continue at that pace, we would see 233 fatalities by the end of the year.

Now if you are of an age, you might think that number is a lot less than we saw in the past, and you would be absolutely right. The dubious distinction of worst year on record goes to 1972, when 640 people were killed, even though we had a population of just over three million, and around one-third as many cars on the road. With 5.1 million people now living in the state, it is clear that death rate per 100,000 population is way lower, but every death matters, and every life lost sees another family shattered, especially when those who lose their lives are so young.

Distressing

The most distressing thing of all, though, is that we had been doing so well getting the numbers down. In 2021, 130 died on our roads, and while lockdown restrictions curtailed our journeys in the first few months of that year and might have played a part, the prepandemic low of 138 deaths in 2018 already had led to optimism that we were finally getting a handle on this scourge.

In 2022, though, the number crept up to 155, and last year, including some horrible tragedies with multiple fatalities in single incidents, there were 184 deaths.

What makes this even more depressing is that cars have never been safer, with aids such as airbags, crumple zones, adaptive cruise control, speed sign recognition, lane departure alert, automatic braking when danger is sensed, and so on, now pretty much standard even on massmarket models.

At many media launches of new cars, on tracks or in car parks under controlled conditions, I have been invited to drive the car directly at an obstacle, usually an inflatable wall or something similar, to test the car’s own response. Very often, before the car can do anything, I have hit the brakes myself, because to do so is instinctive. When I have resisted the urge, the car in any case does the work, even to the point of tightening the seatbelt automatically to minimise any injury.

So, I wonder sometimes if maybe we have become over-reliant on these technological innovations, and this makes us drop our guard when it comes to what we used to rely on, namely concentration. The migration of some key functions to touchscreens bothers me, especially the air-conditioning controls. Previously, the muscle memory involved in reaching for a dial on the fascia meant you never took your eyes off the road for even a split second.

Another serious issue is that our local and rural roads are often not fit for purpose. That problem is easily fixed so long as there is a will to do it, and I’ll give you an example.

For years, when travelling between Dublin and my home in north Wexford, I had to drive through the Ballinameesda Bends, between Rathnew and Arklow. They were notoriously dangerous, and many lives were lost there in a relatively short period of time. Then the M11 extension opened in 2015 and I can find no record of any road deaths in that area since.

Twice in the past two months, I have heard roads on which people died called ‘black spots’, just as those bends once were. How casually we absorb that term. They are not black spots, they are death traps, and it should be the priority of every local authority, not necessarily to build a motorway but at the very least to straighten a bend, resurface a road, erect crash barriers, put in speed bumps, anything at all that will prevent further and unnecessary deaths.

Behaviour

Above all, though, drivers simply have to modify their behaviour. In my work as the motoring writer for this newspaper, I naturally spend a lot of time with my counterparts from other media outlets, and one thing on which we all agree is that the standard of driving has deteriorated significantly since the end of the pandemic. To speculate on why would be foolhardy, because without proper research, I cannot know for certain, but tailgating in particular has reached epidemic proportions.

Just last week, on the M50, a massive truck was driving so close behind me, all I could see in the rearview mirror was the radiator grille when, at the very least, it should have been so far back I at least could see the driver, and preferably the entire height of the vehicle.

When I’m in the Dublin area nowadays, I see aggressive lane weaving, breaking of red lights, and that frequent cause of anger for other drivers, the middle-lane sitters who shouldn’t be there at all. Unless you’re overtaking, the only place you should be on a three-lane motorway is in the left lane, yet the number of people who don’t understand that is simply staggering.

My late friend Rosemary Smith was passionate about teaching the basics of driving to children in transition year in school. That is an initiative the state should embrace. We try hard to instil respect for other rules in our children, so why not the rules of the road too?

The benefits of that might take a decade to be measured, though. In the meantime, for the love of god, would you all have a long think about how you drive? The best safety aid of all on the road is your brain. Use it.