crash course in road safety

Road safety campaigns are all well and good, but I believe we need more information on crashes that have already happened to help us prevent more tragedies

It is nice to see an elected representative consulting the blogosphere for suggestions and I applaud Cllr Damien Blake for his efforts with his RoadSafetyBlog. This is something I have commented about quite a bit on my various sites, but I have no problem outlining my suggestions yet again.

Though the obvious answer would be more stringent enforcement of the existing laws, I wonder are we examining the correct statistics regarding the dangerous driving that is happening on our roads.

I believe a register should be established, and each time an incident happens, be it someone caught driving dangerously, or an actual fatal crash caused by such behaviour, it should be recorded.

Then, once the case has been fully investigated, the media can go back and report to us exactly what transpired. Because of drawn out legal processes, by the time it is established what actually happened in a particular crash, attention has been drawn to yet another accident and the cycle begins again.

If there was a public register for these events, then over time we could be properly debating the situation and pinpointing the proper causes. As the individual cases were settled, we would eventually see a pattern of how many incidents were down to alcohol, how many were down to driver error, how many were down to speeding, how many were just plain accidents.

Right now, I feel we are just dealing with vague notions of the numerous perils involved. Drink driving, excessive speeds and such are of course dangerous, but until they are publicly linked to crashes, I reckon there’s a belief out there that it somehow won’t happen to us personally

Imagine a media report such as this : “It emerged from the courts today that the Monaghan crash from October 2006 (RSA register #06-786) was caused by…” and maybe then we would all think twice about whatever the cause was found to be.

All I am suggesting is that we are presented with the proper information when tackling this issue. Of course it is a tragedy when someone loses their life and it should be reported, but the overall debate on road safety should include ALL incidents of dangerous driving, like for example the two yobbos who were caught speeding in Westmeath and given lenient sentences.