Boots on ground the best way to end road carnage

WE SAT and counted, waiting for the blur. Six seconds later, it arrived, the light long gone red, ours turned green, but still the car tore through, in a desperate rush to… join the traffic backed up less than 50 metres down the road.

Stopped with two small children at the same junction morning after morning, we sit, waiting for the traffic light to go green, signalling us to turn right and towards the main road.

And almost without fail, a car will break the red light to our left at this small junction, in the heart of a tranquil suburban housing estate, shortly after 7am – winter or summer, whatever the weather, the road conditions, or our intentions.

Life’s rich variety is captured in the vehicles that speed through, from white van men, to parents with their children in the car, to young people in cars plastered in L and N stickers.

Selfish

All adopt the same stance, gripping the steering wheel intently and staring ahead as they break red, eyes fixed on the road, for fear of making contact with the motorist whose life they could have endangered by behaving with such selfish recklessness.

It’s a short spin to drop our children off, but the journey there and back will usually run the gamut of motoring disasters now blighting our roads.

There will be the cyclist behaving as if they are locked in a fierce pursuit for the finish line in a stage of the Tour de France, not letting anything get in their way – be that traffic lights, pedestrians or other road users.

They zoom from footpath to road, in and out of traffic, sweeping past startled walkers if it’s quicker to mount the path – and rarely, if ever, does a cyclist stop on red.

There will also be the driver engaging in the new craze for tailgating, as highlighted in these pages by Philip Nolan.

The aim seems to be to get so close to your car that you can see in the rear-view mirror how anxious they are for you to break the speed limit, because they are in a rush and dreadfully important, so you should just get out of the way.

This daily immersion in the ignorance masquerading as road etiquette all takes place in a two-mile radius, and at no point is the permitted limit higher than 50 kilometres per hour.

These are not conditions where any driver with a modicum of wit should be taking chances, or driving quickly behind other cars trying to intimidate them out of the way. But there has been such a breakdown in how we use the roads that the school run has mutated into a fraught exposure to the worst excesses of the dumb and the entitled.

Much more seriously, it is easy to see how this behaviour results in carnage when drivers take these habits onto roads with higher speed limits, or where the absence of lights means they don’t even have to think twice about putting feet to the floor.

To anyone who drives a car, there is no mystery behind the heartbreaking increase in road deaths recorded so far this year.

Wretched behaviour is one problem. Drink-driving seems an ineradicable curse, with drugs now an added risk. The quality of roads is another issue. But policing is a major difficulty, too.

Simon Harris conceded on Monday that ‘we’re not in a good place at all’, as the Taoiseach reminded the Road Safety Authority of its responsibilities.

It is blindingly obvious, however, that policing should be at the centre of the State response.

It must be – and it must go way beyond the half-baked notion of gardaí being required to devote half an hour of every shift to road policing. Serving, experienced officers were among those who predicted this idea would have ‘no effect’, but there was no requirement for specialist knowledge to see this as a PR exercise.

Challenge

Much more telling were the figures in this newspaper that captured the challenge facing gardaí. Since 2009, the number of officers dedicated to road policing has declined by 399, from 1,046 15 years ago to 647 this year.

Worse, that reduced force is dealing with an increase of at least 440,000 cars on the road in the same time period.

Regular drivers will know this. This one has been driving 20 years, and has been breathalysed once – and that was outside Bath in the UK, returning from a rugby match on a dreadful December night, many seasons ago.

The summer brings the joyful duty of covering matches in the GAA championship, and long drives the length and breadth of the island rarely bring sight of a patrol car.

The Taoiseach is correct in urging everyone who drives to adjust their behaviour if required, and the dismal examples cited here show too many of us are taking terrible risks behind the wheel.

Technology can help to catch law-breakers, too, but there is no substitute for boots – and wheels – on the roads.

It is the simplest, most powerful way to save lives.