The national road safety strategy “isn’t working” and needs to be significantly overhauled to reduce deaths and serious injuries, the head of Dublin City Council’s traffic division, Brendan O’Brien, has said.
The strategy aims to reduce deaths and serious injury by 50 per cent by 2030, which would require annual fatalities to fall to 72 or lower. Last year 155 people were killed on the roads, up 13 per cent on the previous year. In January 18 people were killed, the highest number in a decade.
There was a serious risk that this year would be the worst in ten years or more for road deaths, Mr O’Brien said.
“The road safety strategy in Ireland at the moment isn’t working. The number of fatalities in 2022 has gone up quite significantly and so far this year, unless something quite dramatic happens, this year will be the worst year probably in a decade or even longer for road fatalities,” he said
“If it keeps up at the rate where there were almost 20 people killed in January, at that rate we are going to have some serious issues.”
Dublin City Council has drafted a road safety strategy, which is required to mirror the national strategy. However, Mr O’Brien said these strategies needed to be overhauled to reflected changes in driver behaviour.
“What’s a real issue now, which we wouldn’t have seen as much before is distracted driving – people on their phones, people on videos and so on while they’re driving ... it’s clear that the road safety strategy needs to be significantly overhauled.”
Mr O’Brien said he had a meeting last week with the Road Safety Authority (RSA) and other agencies to discuss these issues. “Really it was felt that road safety needs to be addressed on a multi-agency level, and it needs to be addressed far more forcefully probably than it’s done at the moment.”
In relation to road safety in the city, while the council could put traffic calming and other road safety infrastructure in place, it had no role in enforcement.
“We’re not the enforcement agency so we depend a lot on other agencies. We depend on the Garda a lot. Where we can make differences is in the engineering, but we don’t have control over the whole thing. Just because we write in a report that we want to see the numbers down, our role in that, while it’s an important role, is not the only role.”
Mr O’Brien was speaking at a city council traffic committee on Wednesday which the RSA had declined an invitation to attend. Committee chairwoman Noeleen Reilly had invited the RSA to present an update on the road safety strategy. In response RSA chief executive Sam Waide instead provided “a quick update” on the current strategy.
He said there is an interim target to reduce fatalities to 122 or lower, and serious injuries to 1,133 or lower by the end of 2024. The target for 2023 is 130 road deaths or fewer, he said. Ireland has also committed to the European Commission’s Vision Zero which aims to completely eradicate fatal crashes by 2050.
