A leading vehicle-crash investigator has said information available on accidents is not detailed enough to allow decision-makers carry out accurate assessments about the causes.
Dr Denis Woods, a forensic engineer, said it was inadequate to base decisions about road safety in an Irish context on data from international studies. He said the Dáil, An Garda and the Department of Transport all lack specific information on crashes.
He said the problem was the limited information being collected, which relies heavily on the judgment of the investigating Garda at the crash scene as to what the significant factors were.
"To be fair, this is not just a problem with the gardaí. It is a problem with most of the police-based collection systems worldwide which don't have the in-depth research done by on-the-spot [accident scene] investigators."
His comments follow an admission by Minister for Transport Martin Cullen in the Dáil last week that information on vehicle crashes was "somewhat scattered".
Ms Olivia Mitchell, Fine Gael spokeswoman on transport, had told the Dáil the type of investigation carried out at a crash site depended on whether there was a criminal prosecution: "There does not seem to be any clarity about the causes of accidents."
Responding, Mr Cullen said: "I agree that the information we need to assemble if we are to make legislative or policy judgments is too thinly spread. The entire body of such information is not available in the cohesive and detailed form that we would like."
Dr Woods said relying only on the garda crash reports was a key weakness. "Unless you train every garda in how to code the significance, the information loses its value," he said.
"I don't think we can say we have the way to reduce the number of accidents unless we know exactly what's happening on the roads. If you take countries like England which are culturally quite similar, but have lower road fatalities, they know a lot more about their accidents than we know about ours," Dr Woods added.
He also cautioned against relying on the preconceptions applied to nighttime accidents at the weekend: "A lot of people come to vehicle accidents and what should be done with a preconceived view . . . that it's all the driver's fault, they were drinking, speeding whatever. In fact, crashes are much more complex."
"While I have no doubt that inexperience, speed, drug and alcohol could be factors in some crashes, I believe there are likely to be other factors too," he said.
One of these other factors is road engineering, particularly on minor roads. "It isn't necessarily just the quality of the road surface. For example, differences in the standard of road infrastructure can cause as much difficulty for a driver as a uniformly poor road," according to Dr Woods.
"If you drive through our minor roads you do not get a consistency of engineering, of warnings and road markings. You go through upgraded and then quite poor sections of road."
Dr Woods has recommended a in-depth study of single vehicle weekend accidents. "We need researchers to go out to visit the scene, look at the vehicle, determine the causative factors, get the information from the drivers. The study could well come up with some surprising results."
Currently the National Roads Authority collates road statistics based on information from An Garda Síochána.
