In these days of the Tiger, everything has its price; yet there is still something shocking about Dr Peter Bacon's report on road safety, which spells out the monetary cost of road accidents and the monetary benefits of reducing them. A death is estimated at £751,500, a serious injury at £153,050, a minor injury at £16,520, a damage-only accident at £3,750. On this basis, Dr Bacon shows that the national strategy for road safety should result in a net saving to the State of £536 million by 2002, if it succeeds in its stated aim of reducing deaths and serious injuries to at least 20 per cent below 1997 levels.
The natural sense of unease at expressing human loss and misery in terms of a cost-benefit analysis was acknowledged by Mr Cartan Finnegan, chairman of the National Safety Council, which commissioned the Bacon report. It was "almost crude or crass to talk about death or injury in monetary terms," he said. Yet it was important that the council should set standards which could be measured.
In short, the report is designed to demonstrate to the community - and, more pointedly, to the Government in the run-up to the Budget - that investment in road safety programmes produces a very good deal. And perhaps the truly shocking aspect of it is that the council should have to resort to such chillingly persuasive accountancy to overcome Government inertia on a matter of life and death.
Last year, 458 people were killed on the roads of the Republic. That is an appalling total. Yet it was two per cent below the figure for 1997 and, with new cars and inexperienced drivers flooding onto the roads at record rates, it could be claimed as evidence of progress. In his review of 1998, Cartan Finnegan warned that "any delay of implementation [in the national road strategy] through lack of resources threatens a return to the fatality rate that devastated the community in the late 1970s".
It is now more than 14 months since that strategy, The Road to Safety, was launched with much fanfare by the Taoiseach, who described the rate of road deaths as an unacceptable social problem that had to be tackled "immediately and systematically". Key aims included halving the incidence of speeding, increasing compliance with seat-belt regulations to 85 per cent and reducing night-time fatalities (commonly drink-related) by 25 per cent. Yet the Government has not yet provided the Garda with a new computer system which was promised then as a matter of urgency. The equipment is needed to process the massive increase in on-the-spot fines resulting from the Garda's campaign against speeding and to allow the introduction of a "penalty points" system for traffic offences - for which the Government has yet to legislate.
The main recommendation of the Bacon report is that "priority be given to accelerating the deployment of resources required to give effect to the strategy". This is official language for asking the Government to put its money where its mouth is. Surely the message, in monetary as well as in human terms, is all too clear.