By making the right investment, we can immediately cut our road deaths to the lowest levels of any country in the world. As a businessman, I am attracted by the fact that the return on this investment would be both sizeable and fast, writes Senator Feargal Quinn argues that investing in road.
We all felt a burst of euphoria following the drop in road deaths shortly after the penalty points were introduced. This has now given way to despair as the death figures have steadily climbed up again. For many, this despair has turned into a belief that penalty points have proved a failure. I believe that conclusion is utterly wrong.
In the four months after penalty points came in, road deaths dropped to an average of 21 a month. This was half the 1997 level that provoked the creation of the National Road Safety Strategy. Overnight, it brought Ireland into line with the best-performing countries worldwide on road safety.
It is hard to over-estimate the significance of this. After years of wringing our hands, we had finally found the lever to change driver behaviour and reduce dramatically the number of road deaths.
The single lever was the fear of losing your licence as a result of speeding. That fear was now proven highly effective, in sharp contrast to the limited effect brought about by years of advertising and educational efforts. Against all logic, the fear of losing one's licence proved more effective than even the fear of being killed or maimed.
But the effect didn't last very long. After the first months, the deaths began to climb again - and have done so continuously ever since, heading back towards the levels that applied before penalty points came into existence.
In the year to the end of August, the average monthly death toll was 30.5. In August alone it was 36.
September will bring a further increase in the moving annual total of monthly fatalities: the deadly trend is all one-way.
A recent survey showed that more than one third of motorists admitted to regular speeding.
Unless we take effective action, what is to stop the level climbing back to 40 a month?
However, a positive side is revealed when we look behind these figures. First, the chain of cause and effect is perfectly clear: the initial change in driving behaviour came directly from a belief that speeding would result in losing your licence. (Not an unreasonable belief, in view of all the hype around penalty points.)
What happened after four months? Simply this. People realised the level of implementation was so low that the connection between speeding and losing your licence was broken.
Motorists judged that their chances of getting away with speeding were extremely high. They relaxed their behaviour accordingly.
For the few months that people believed there was a high chance of being caught speeding, they radically changed their behaviour. However, as soon as they realised how small was the chance of being caught, the deterrent effect of penalty points began to fade.
Not only was the implementation of penalty points inadequate, it was also uneven. Very few speed checks are carried out at the times of highest risk (weekend nights from 10 p.m. to 3 a.m.) and still fewer at the places of highest risk (single-carriageway country roads).
The lesson is clear. Fear of losing one's licence is an effective deterrent. So we should focus on making the connection between speeding and loss of licence more certain.
We can cut the level of deaths back to what we achieved in the early days of penalty points by doing just one thing - convincing people that their chance of being caught is too high to make the risk worthwhile.
How to do this? More Garda resources? A dedicated Road Traffic Corps? Few would entertain the hope that either will happen in the foreseeable future. But there is one effective solution that is available, if we have the courage to invest heavily enough in it. This is speed cameras, which record the number of any speeding vehicle that passes before them.
They work 24 hours a day, and don't need overtime.
They can be relocated in a short period of time, multiplying the number of places where speeding motorists can be detected.
Their deterrent effect can be multiplied again with cheap dummy cameras, where the driver does not know whether he is being monitored or not.
Perhaps most significantly of all, we can have speed cameras simply by writing a cheque and letting the private sector deliver the service.
Speed cameras are on the agenda, but my fear is that the central point about them will be lost: unless they create a high possibility of being caught, the investment will be wasted. Drivers are not fools, and will quickly make up their minds about this.
So in investing in speed cameras, we must not pinch pennies. We must blanket the whole country, not just the easy targets so beloved of gardaí with speed guns.
We must invest enough to create an inevitable connection between speeding and losing your licence.
How much should we spend? Well, let's remember what we stand to gain. Research by Dr Peter Bacon suggests that the all-in cost to the community of a road fatality is, very roughly, €1 million. Reducing road deaths from 31 per month to 20 would save the community €11 million, or €132 million a year.
We are clearly talking real money here, especially since the cost of deaths is only a part of the cost. The full road accident bill comes to a lot more than this, when we include the thousands of injuries which are a main contributor to the crisis in accident and emergency services in our hospitals.
But the cost of fatalities should give us a ballpark figure of how much we should be prepared to invest.
My guess is that the arithmetic here allows more than enough scope to do the job with speed cameras properly, increasing the possibility of being caught for speeding to a near certainty.
Feargal Quinn is an independent member of the Seanad and chief executive of the Superquinn supermarket group
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