Survey reveals that motorists believe penalty points' effectiveness has weakened since 2003, writes David Labanyi.
The impact of penalty points is considered by motorists to be significantly less effective than in 2003 when they were first introduced, according to a survey of road users.
According to an unpublished Millward Brown survey for the National Safety Council (NSC) "new road traffic laws" were considered either "very or fairly" influential in saving lives on the roads by only 72 per cent of people when surveyed in February 2006, down more than 22 per cent compared with November 2003.
When 1,000 road users were asked what road safety factors they considered "very" influential, the impact of new road traffic laws dropped from 74 per cent in November 2003 to just 36 per cent when asked the same question early this year.
The survey also found the public's perception of the influence of Garda enforcement and NSC safety television advertising on saving lives had also dropped over the same period.
The survey does not include the impact of the additional 31 penalty points which were introduced in April.
David Lyle, ceo of LyleBailie International, which runs and ranks the effectiveness of television road safety campaigns for the NSC, explains that the survey shows the public perception of the effectiveness of penalty points dropped between 2003 and 2006. "Also the slippage in the effectiveness of all measures is to do with the fact that road deaths have gone up and therefore the perception of the success of the penalty points regime has been dampened."
However, he cautioned against criticism of the penalty points regime, saying evidence from a series of surveys on road users suggested a measurable change in attitudes and behaviour by Irish motorists and that road safety television campaigns had played a leading role in this.
"The significant factor is that if the trend that had existed in the eight years before the NSC television campaigns started had continued we would have had a death toll of 625 per year instead of 399, taking into account the extra cars on the road. The potential carnage is enormously above what it is today and that is down to a change in behaviour.
"It should also be noted that between 2003 and 2006 there was a heightened focus by the media on the tragedies of road carnage, which is welcome but has dampened the public's perceptions," Mr Lyle said.
Last week the Garda Commissioner Noel Conroy warned against overstating the relationship between attitude and subsequent behaviour when talking about an improvement in driver behaviour. A belief in such an improvement was "not strongly supported by empirical evidence" the Commissioner said, citing evidence that the 6,147 motorists detected drink-driving to date was up 19 per cent on last year. However, Mr Lyle disagrees with this view.
"Arrests for drink driving in different jurisdictions vary erratically depending on the resources behind the policing enforcement and decisions about targeting. So as a piece of empirical evidence it is not all that conclusive. The really hard behavioural evidence concerns the number of recorded collisions where the leading factor was seen to be driver alcohol."
This information is not comprehensively collected here. "Nowhere is a comprehensive collection made of the involvement of driver alcohol at low blood alcohol levels, as well as over the limit. So we are missing out a complete raft of insight into what is happening," Mr Lyle said.
The impact of television road safety campaigns is periodically measured, and LyleBailie has sampled more than 72,000 people in the Republic and 84,000 people in Northern Ireland to track the impact of road safety campaigns.