Technology is already available that could have prevented last week's motorway pile-up from occurring. Paddy Comynreports
The events of last week, which led to the tragic death of mother-of-one Kate Moyles, as well as to the injury of a number of others on a fog-bound M7 has focused attention on driver behaviour.
Eyewitness reports from many of those involved said drivers were simply driving too quickly for the conditions, a point supported by comments from the Garda, the Road Safety Authority (RSA) and the Automobile Association.
However, others caught up in the pile-up pointed the finger at the absence of roadside warning of the conditions, or the fact that crashed vehicles blocked the road ahead.
Here in Ireland, we are novices when it comes to motorway driving.
For a start, we are not trained formally on how to drive on them. The new Rules of the Road deals with how to behave on a motorway, but the driving test won't test you on what you are supposed to know. And while you are not supposed to drive on a motorway with a provisional licence, many do - often out of pure necessity.
The fact that our motorways have two lanes instead of three won't have helped matters either. Having become a nation that lives by the clock, every second and every metre counts on our daily commute. Our motorways are not for the faint-hearted. Every gap is exploited and every millimetre of tarmac is filled.
We have quickly become conditioned to drive this way. This was a time bomb waiting to explode. And it did last Tuesday.
The spark that lit the fuse was fog. It might have been snow or ice or an oil spill. Either way, our drivers were exposed as flawed. But it is hopelessly naïve to say there was nothing more that could have been done and, crucially, that there is no way of preventing this from happening again.
When we take a look at best practice in other countries for dealing with motorway hazards, it seems as if we have at our disposal a plethora of potential options to prevent such events from happening again.
In Britain, on the M25 and more recently on the M42, the Highways Agency has mandatory variable speed limits in place. Variable speed limits are exactly what they seem: drivers are obliged to drive the speed that is displayed at any given time on an overhead gantry.
On these roads they are used to managing congestion and incidents because, although it defies obvious logic, when they slow down the traffic they can get more through more quickly. In operation, Advanced Motorway Indicators (AMI) display the speed limit over each lane and these are linked to a gantry-mounted camera head incorporating radar-based speed detectors.
If the sign says 50mph, and you drive faster, a digital picture is taken of your car and you will receive a fine and penalty points in the post the following day. Most of the time these signs are off and the normal limits apply, but if the signs are up, it is for a reason.
Over in California, the state's Highway Patrol might have been able to deal with an event like last week's pile-up differently. Their highways are dotted with Environmental Sensor Stations (ESS).
These include a rain gauge, a forward-scatter visibility detector, wind speed and direction sensor, a barometer and a remote processing unit. Depending on the weather conditions (this area is prone to localised fog in the winter) these sensors will relay messages to computers in the Traffic Management Centre, which in turn display warning messages on signs.
Should visibility fall below 200 feet, these signs are supplemented by help from California Highway Patrol officers who group traffic into "platoons" and lead them at a safe pace through areas with low visibility.
Nineteen fog-related crashes occurred in the four-year period before the system was deployed. Since the system was activated in November 1996, there have been no fog-related crashes. A similar system is in operation in Sydney, Australia, where the speed of a motorway can be reduced if there is a high level of rainfall.
John Harris is the European Business Development Director of Redflex Traffic Systems, a traffic safety and enforcement service and one of the pre-selected bidders for the contract to run Ireland's privatised speed camera networks. His company, if successful, will be required to carry out 6,000 hours of detection on 600 designated blackspots throughout the country.
According to Harris: "These would consist of 50-100 portable units, 20 fixed cameras and six time-over-distance cameras (average speed) operating at any one time".
The service will be self-funded from the fines, but the success of the winning operator will be measured not from revenue alone. "It is a requirement that 50 per cent of the population will have to come across a speed controlled device in any given month," Harris points out.
So let's ask a utopian question: could we combine the technology we have mentioned into one system?
Harris says that we can: "It would be possible to have a system in place that uses fog detectors linked to variable message signs and enforced by speed cameras. This is something we could readily supply. No country has used such a system yet in this form but it would seem a logical solution."
NONE OF THIS has been in Redflex's brief as yet nor, we expect, any of the other tenders for the new speed cameras.
This would, in simple terms, mean that it would not be left up to the driver to decide how to drive in poor conditions. If the visibility or indeed some other environmental conditions are poor, signs would automatically warn us of this, a slower and safer speed limit would be set and this would be enforced by overhead speed cameras.
Perhaps somewhat "Big Brother" for some but we do, it seems, need some guidance when knowing what is good for us. We do have a time and a chance to be pioneers in this area. The question is, do we care enough?