WHEN I was ten, one of my brothers was knocked off his bike by a car. He was cycling home from school when a car came down the wrong side of the road and smacked into him.
My brother was in a coma for two days and hospitalised for weeks. Eventually, he made a full recovery. The driver was drunk and very lucky he didn’t kill him.
Decades later, not much has changed. Drink driving laws have improved but car numbers have exploded and many cars look more like Panzers than private vehicles, making cycling and walking on open roads a dance with death.
Reducing speed limits, higher policing and stricter penalties will help reduce road deaths.
Just as important is Government policy to cool our love affair with cars, particularly SUVs, by making it harder and more expensive to drive vehicles the size of tanks and ensuring enough safe space for cyclists and pedestrians.
Of the 184 deaths reported in the Republic of Ireland in 2023, 69 were drivers, 44 were pedestrians, 34 were passengers, 26 were motorcyclists, eight were cyclists and three were e-scooter users. There were 1,250 serious injuries by mid-December. This year has started off in a similarly tragic vein.
New speed limits will be put in place by the end of 2024, with all local authorities being told to review the streets in their area by the end of the summer to ensure the measures can be enforced. Under new laws, speed limits will be lowered to 80kph on national secondary roads, 60kph on local and rural roads, and 30kph in town centres and housing estates.
There is strong evidence that speed has a direct influence on the occurrence of road accidents and their severity. According to a widely used scientific formula, every 1% rise in average speed results in a 2% increase in all injury crashes, a 3% rise in fatal and severe crashes and 4% more fatal crashes. Lowering speed limits also reduces emissions, fuel consumption and noise.
But speed limits need to be policed to be effective. Garda road policing numbers have continued to fall, with 47 fewer officers on the roads at the end of 2023 than at the start of the year. The numbers have dropped 39% since 2009, despite roads being busier than ever. Transport Minister Jack Chambers acknowledged recently that “enforcement isn’t at a level that it should be and needs to improve”.
Other measures receiving limited attention in their ability to impact on road deaths include removing space for cars and generally making life more difficult for motorists.
The number of cars per 1,000 inhabitants in Ireland was 446 in 2020 - the highest recorded since 1990. Is it any wonder that injuries and fatalities have increased? And it’s not just the number of cars on the roads that has exploded. Ireland is a European leader in its love for SUVs. The European Automobile Manufacturer’s Association report that just under 65% of all new passenger cars sold in Ireland in 2022 were SUVs, 13% above the European average.
‘This is a trend that has accelerated in the last five years,” chief executive of Toyota Financial Services Ireland, Michael Gaynor told the Financial Times, in October. ‘Can (sales) go higher? Yes (they) will.’
Bigger, heavier cars are a safety disaster for other drivers as well as cyclists and pedestrians. Think about the outcome of a supersized Land Rover sliding into the side of you on a wet highway compared to a similar incident with a Volkswagen Golf or Fiat Panda. What are the chances of a small child on a bike being visible in front of a Range Rover at close range? In the U.S, deaths in car crashes rose 33% between 2011 and 2021 and pedestrian deaths have risen by 77% since 2010. Last year, the average weight of a new car in the U.S was more than 2,000kg - a full 450kg heavier than in 1980.
In France, where just over 45% of cars sold were SUVs in 2022, mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo is proposing tripling parking rates for them in central Paris to €18 an hour, and €12 an hour for the rest of the city. The measure would include hybrids and electric vehicles over a certain weight, though with an exemption for Paris resident parking, and would affect about 10% of cars. Think what a stiff parking fee like that would do to the number of Irish SUV drivers parking in Irish cities.
Two capital cities in Europe stand out for successfully cutting road fatalities. Oslo and Helsinki cut speed limits, changed street design, removed spaces for cars, and generally made life harder for motorists. It’s working. Neither city recorded a single pedestrian fatality in 2019.
Helsinki reduced deaths from an average of 20-30 per year in the 1990s. Oslo had no pedestrian or cyclist deaths in the city of 680,000 in 2019 and no children under 16 in traffic fatalities in the entire country.
Christoffer Solstad Steen, of Trygg Trafikk, a road safety organisation in Norway, said that politicians in Oslo have chosen to make it more difficult to drive a car. Oslo set a target to reduce traffic by 30% by 2030.
“It takes more time to drive from one part of the city to another and you have to pay to use the road much more than you used to.”
The measures include strict speed limits, an increase in tolls by 70% (resulting in a 6% decrease in traffic), the removal of thousands of car park spaces, ‘heart zones’ around schools where traffic is banned, safety education in schools and media, and better street design with separation of pedestrians and cyclists from cars.
These are rich pickings for policy-makers in Ireland, as plans for a major re-haul of public transport, cycling and pedestrian facilities forge ahead in Irish cities in the next decade.
“Building safer roads is the easy bit,” said Steen. ‘It is more difficult to get people to understand that this is important and make them act in a secure way.”
My brother escaped fatal injury by a whisker decades ago. In 2023, almost 200 Irish citizens were not so lucky and sadly lost their lives on Irish roads.
Isn’t it time we caught up with best practice in Europe by tempering the Irish love affair with more and bigger cars and invoked a cultural change to insist that we all slow down and protect each other?
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