Where in this State is the motorist most likely to be killed or injured? Speed kills, we are told. And a photograph on the front page of last week's Meath Chronicle has a caption which tells us that "this innocent-looking box", a sort of robotic metal device on the Navan-Kells road, can produce accurate photographs of traffic with an accurate estimate of its speed. Other robots will be added so that "Operation Lifesaver", as they call it, "has begun to eat into Louth-Meath Division's unenviable reputation for having the highest level of road fatalities and accidents in the country." It might be said that impatience and frustration are also dangers to life, and the increasing (or so it seems) volume of lorries and the increasing (or so it seems) size of the same, must be a hazard, too. As to size, just find yourself behind three lorries and you may have no vision. And now they are not only on the main roads, but huge, long ones often dodge away into small winding side roads to avoid frustrations themselves. As these huge things swing around a bend, coming against you, you can get the fright of your life.
The Swiss, according to an article in the French magazine Le Point, have firm ideas about all this. They ban from all their roads lorries of over 28 tonnes. Just what size this is, the layman can only guess; but the Swiss do take these lorries by train, and they have built new alpine railways. In 1997 this rail transport carried eight million tonnes of goods, or, says the article, the equivalent of four hundred thousand lorries of 28 tonnes. In the same year, one million two hundred thousand lorries carried only 9 million tonnes. In a new agreement with the European Union, signed in June, Switzerland agreed that from the year 2000, lorries of 40 tonnes can take the route into Italy from Basel, the capital, but must pay a tax of 325 Swiss francs (count roughly two francs to a pound), a measure aimed at encouraging the lorry owners to cross the Alps by rail rather than road.
And they have grandiose plans for making the Lotschberg and Saint-Gothard tunnels open to rail traffic. One of these is 42 kilometres, the other 57. "A titanic task comparable to the Channel tunnel," the article says. But the Swiss are ready to pay for it to avoid having their alpine valleys made unliveable, as happened in France. No chance, you'll say, of our reviving railways as a major way of coping.
