The new national strategy must be informed by drivers, cyclists, passengers and pedestrians, writes Noel Brett, head of the Road Safety Authority
We have to move beyond outrage, sympathy and disbelief. That's where we are right now when it comes to road safety.
Every weekend delivers its horror pictures. Every Saturday night produces its tragedies. Every week some road in Ireland is grimly decorated with flowers commemorating a life lost.
Everybody has a view about road safety. How to improve it. How to reduce deaths and injuries. How to follow the example of countries like Sweden, Britain, the Netherlands and Finland, who have managed to cut the numbers of people killed on their roads by putting the right national strategy in place.
Now, for the first time, the Irish public are being asked to have their say on precisely what's the best road safety strategy for this country. The current national strategy concludes at the end of this year.
Today, the Road Safety Authority is inviting members of the public to help shape the new strategy. To turn their opinions into something more than opinions, into a national lifesaving policy. We're doing this for several good reasons.
For a start, if we're to save lives and prevent injury from road collisions, it's imperative that we harvest every idea, every insight, every observation. We cannot be narrow or single-focused in the development of this strategy.
Of course it will be important to involve all the main organisations responsible for road safety. And by "involve" I don't just mean that the Road Safety Authority should collate submissions from An Garda Síochána, the National Roads Authority, the AA or any of the other stakeholders and register their thinking in the final strategy.
I mean that the process of drafting the strategy will relentlessly stress the need to find new, better, and more integrated ways to help those agencies make an increasingly coherent contribution to the implementation of the plan.
However, asking members of the public to contribute to the new strategy is an important step. By taking this step, we're not assuming that any individual will come up with some brilliant idea that will solve all of our problems, although it's quite possible some individual will come up with a brilliant idea which will solve some of our problems.
The purpose of the consultation is to widen the way we address the issue.
Road safety strategy, according to the best international thinking, must consist of four key elements: education, enforcement, engineering and evaluation.
However, road safety itself depends crucially on the behaviour of individuals.
We haven't always acknowledged that. It has been too easy to blame enforcement or the lack of it. Or to regard the roads as responsible. That, in turn, has allowed too many of us to throw up our hands and cede responsibility and blame alike to them.
The reality is that there's no us and them in road safety. The sooner drivers, cyclists and pedestrians realise that - as individuals - they can make a major input to the saving of lives, the sooner our mortality statistics will begin to reduce.
That's why the RSA asks members of the public to help us by making submissions under the key headings above.
If you have something to offer on, say, education - on explaining and teaching road safety to road users so that the key principles are not only taken on board but play out in day to day behaviour - please let us know.
It's not going to be difficult. We're seeking submissions of no more than two full A4 pages on each area.
If you want to submit on only one area, that's fine. If you want to submit eight pages, covering all four areas, that would be welcome, too.
Submissions should be posted to: Road Safety Strategy 2007 - 2011, The Road Safety Authority, Ballina, County Mayo.
Submissions can also be e-mailed to strategy@rsa.ie.
We need to have your submission by Monday, November 27th, 2006. The RSA website (www.rsa.ie) has more details to help people who would like to make a submission.
The new strategy must be informed by the key users of our roads, drivers, cyclists, passengers and pedestrians. So that we can move from outrage to productive long-term action.
Noel Brett is chief executive officer of the Road Safety Authority