Tackling the 'catastrophe' of road death toll

America has been in trauma this week following the death of a fourth person from anthrax. And yet there seems no national concern about the killing of about 800 people on the roads of the US during the same week. In 1999 there were 41,611 deaths in car accidents in the US, 15.3 deaths per 100,000 people. In the European Union there were 45,000 fatalities and 1.6 million injuries on the roads in 1997.

In Ireland the figure for last year was 407 deaths on the roads, which is about 11 per 100,000 of the population. That 11 per 100,000 rate compares with 21 for Portugal, 14.4 for France, 14.6 for Spain, 6.8 for Norway, 6.6 for Sweden and 6 for Britain.

By any reckoning, the death toll on the roads throughout the developed world is enormous (the OECD estimated that in 1998 over 124,000 people lost their lives on the roads in OECD member countries, which covers what is known as the "developed world"). The World Bank estimates that road accidents could become the third biggest cause of mortality by 2020 unless policies change drastically.

Only a tiny fraction of the 124,000 killed on the roads of developed countries die of terrorism or, for that matter, air accidents. And yet the death toll on the roads gets very little attention. There is no public outcry over it.

Eddie Shaw is chairman of the National Safety Council, which is responsible for the promotion of road safety, among other responsibilities.

He was born in Mullingar in 1950, went to national school there and then to St Finian's secondary school, also in Mullingar. From there he went to UCD where he obtained a B.Comm. Afterwards (in November, 1971) he joined the Hibernian Insurance Company and left Hibernian in April 2000. He is now self-employed, a consultant and, he says, a recreational enthusiast (I forgot to ask what that was). He consults on road safety, healthcare, insurance matters and technology.

He is married with four children aged between 17 and 24. He lives in Glasthule in south Dublin. He became chairman of the National Safety Council in 1990 for a two-year stint which expires next February.

VB: In the Road to Safety, the Government strategy on road safety from 1998-2002, the target was set for a reduction of 20 per cent in the number of fatalities by the year 2002. How are we doing?

ES: We're doing OK. In 1997 there were 472 fatalities, last year there were 407, which represents a drop of about 14 per cent. The figure for this year, I believe, will be lower again, which means we are more or less on target. I think it's fair to say that the targets were modest but they were set. That was important because if they hadn't been set, we wouldn't have made the progress that was now made.

VB The 400-plus figure is still a huge fatality.

ES Oh, there's no question. It is still a huge fatality and serious injury number and it is still a fact to say today, given what we now know, that with a properly resourced and funded strategy, which we now should have next time, we should be able to cut 50 per cent off the existing fatality and serious injury rates.

VB How could that be achieved?

ES: It could be achieved through setting targets in relation to drink driving, to the wearing of seat belts, the same methodology of education of enforcement and engineering but just much more of it, much speedier decisions, much more pace and much more resources pumped into all of the activities and a further additional thing, we would need to empower the high-level group to a much greater extent than it is empowered at present.

VB: What is the high-level group?

ES: The high-level group on road safety. It gathers together representatives from all the different agency bodies involved, Departments of Environment, Justice, Health, the garda∅, the NRA, the NSC, the Medical Bureau for Road Safety, the Insurance Federation, all of them. But it needs to become an empowered body. At the moment it just reviews strategy and recommends changes. For example, we have a road safety strategy but we do not have a road safety budget. The only budget for road safety exists in all of the individual agencies. There is no formal road safety budget and to my way of thinking, if you do not have a budget for a plan, then you do not really have a plan.

VB: Have you put this point to the Government?

ES: That is a point, I think, that is being put to the Government. It is being put as part of the review of the first strategy as we prepare for the next one.

VB: The strategy document identified speed as the major cause of accidents and it identified, I think, 42 per cent of fatal accidents as speed related.

ES: Inappropriate speed.

VB: Is there evidence that speed has been reduced significantly in the last few years?

ES: Not that I am aware of. There is a measurement of speed that takes place, it's done by the National Roads Authority. Now, the results of the first such survey that was done, I think indicated that over 50 per cent of vehicles exceeded the speed limits in various areas which they were talking about.

VB: An obvious way to reduce speed would be to insist that all cars are fitted with governors that would disable them being driven over, say, 55 miles an hour. That automatically would deal with the speed problem to a large extent and would result in a very significant drop in fatalities. Why isn't it done?

ES The answer to that is that I don't know particularly why it is not done. It isn't part that I know of any road safety strategy that I am familiar with worldwide. My perspective on it would be that the primary problem remains the driver and it remains inappropriate speed. So it isn't the maximum speed that somebody will do at a point in time, it's speed that is inappropriate for the circumstances in which they find themselves.

VB: Cars being advertised for the speed they can be driven at is promoting a culture of driving cars at a ridiculously high speed and ridiculously high acceleration rates, isn't that a problem as well?

ES: It is part of the problem and there is no doubt about it that speed continues to be an attractive way apparently of marketing cars. I don't think we should forget that the primary cause is somebody sitting behind the wheel. The primary cause is our behaviour. We drive at inappropriate speeds. We drive and drink. We don't wear seat belts. So the starting point for road safety is changing people's behaviour.

Whether we do it by policing, by engineering, whatever, what I am saying to you is that there is well established evidence that I am aware of that tells me that the combination of policies under enforcement, education, engineering, work, is substantially reducing the incidence of crashes. That's what has happened in Sweden, Finland, Holland, part of the UK, part of the US and, most notable of all, I think in the state of Victoria in Australia.

VB: In the Government strategy, it stated that the Government will also consider the possibility of some change in the present legal requirement for a member of the Garda S∅ochβna to have formed the opinion that the person has consumed alcohol before requiring a roadside breathalyser test. The Government has been considering this for several years now in spite of the fact that it is pretty obvious that this is a necessary measure to reduce road deaths.

ES: I think there certainly is some necessary measure to substantially increase the level of enforcement on drink driving because it is a serious problem. Some measures are in the current Road Traffic Bill that is coming before the Dβil. I believe for example that the garda∅ will be entitled to breathalyse anyone who has been involved in an accident, in a crash, so that will be an improvement. But the scale of drink driving is so great that it needs much more than the current legislation and much more than the proposed legislation to deal with it.

VB: Isn't this an obvious remedy that the garda∅ be free to randomly test?

ES: I think it is a remedy that should be very carefully examined. I know that random breath testing is a difficult and sensitive issue but I'm saying it as strongly as I can, we need an awful lot more than we have at the moment.

VB: Sensitive with whom?

ES: I think it's sensitive for the garda∅, I think it's sensitive for the politicians, I think it's sensitive even for our community.

VB: Why?

ES: Because I think concerns would be expressed the moment that we mention it about civil liberties, I think concerns would be expressed by the garda∅ that it's going to drive a wedge between themselves and their community and we'll disrupt community policing as they see it. From the politicians, I think there would be a concern that they would look back to see what was the response of the electorate when we moved the drink driving limit to its existing level. I do think there would be resistance. But I'm not saying that that's a reason not to do it. I'm saying I think we should have a look and see and ask ourselves the question and see what our communities would think about it.

But it does require leadership on an issue like this, it's not going to happen just by talking about it. You've got to get to a level of enforcement where people believe there is a big risk of being caught if they go drink driving on the road. But ten or twelve thousand (tests) doesn't do it, you need to be up around 200,000 or 300,000, to around the same rates that you are applying to speed testing. The only way you are going to get that is through some policy like random breath testing. You're certainly not going to get it from the existing policy and you will not get it simply from breathalysing people at the scene of an accident.

VB: Another issue that comes up again and again is that slightly less than a quarter of all drivers have only a provisional licence. It does seem to suggest that there is a problem there?

ES: There is a problem. I think the problem is well recognised as the Department knows, it's a problem that has come to us from history. We both have a disproportionately large number of provisional licence drivers on the road and even though we are increasing the capacity for people to do the test, it's only slowly eating into that number just as more people come on stream. I think a much more serious problem is that the standards that we have in both, the standard which determines who is qualified to teach people to drive, the standard that's applied to trainee drivers and the standard that's applied to this test to get your licence, are all now seriously below, less practised by other overseas visitors.

VB: There is a tolerance for road fatalities that is amazing, it wouldn't be tolerated in any other sphere of life.

ES: It's extraordinary but because it happens just in small numbers aggregated over a period of time, it doesn't get the attention that a catastrophe would get. It is a catastrophe. There's a tolerance for it because individually none of us believes we're responsible even though collectively, we're clearly responsible. That's one of the issues when it comes to changing people's attitudes and behaviour. About half of us behave reasonably on the roads, about half of us don't. But the half that don't behave reasonably think they're the half that do.

VB: How do any of us know that we are in the half that behaves unreasonably on the roads?

ES: You don't. There's a bit of a challenge there but it's back to what enforcement and education are about, changing people's attitudes, changing their behaviour. There was a piece of research done on the use of mobile phones because they wanted to find out was the use of a mobile phone in a car a serious hazard. They had a driver in the car obviously, they had an observer and they had a video camera. They went through the same route with the hand-held phone then with a hands-free phone and then with no phone. Now there were a couple of interesting observations out of the exercise. There was a clear increase in the risk in the way in which the car was being driven both with hands-free and hand-held and in fact there was surprisingly little difference between hands-free and hand-held. But the key point was that the driver would not believe the observations that had been made until he was shown the video tape of his behaviour in the car.

VB: How could there be any difference between talking on the telephone, a hands-free phone in a car and talking to another passenger in a car?

ES: There's a huge difference. First of all, talking to another passenger in a car, the passenger is present there with you, seeing and hearing and observing what's going on. Usually they would be somebody who would be another driver or they are used to risk on the road, they will automatically regulate the conversation. Somebody on the other end of the phone, they may know that you are in the car but have no idea what the circumstances are.