Cerchiamo di razionalizzare le morti per strada immaginandole come incidenti strani
We try to rationalise road deaths by imagining them as freak accidents
di Amazing-Yak-5415
Cerchiamo di razionalizzare le morti per strada immaginandole come incidenti strani
We try to rationalise road deaths by imagining them as freak accidents
di Amazing-Yak-5415
7 commenti
Okay, let’s get few things straight away before car haters.
1) The need to drive – the majority who live outside of Dublin and similar cities HAVE to drive unless they do WFH or live within 30 mins of work. That’s just a fact. So no, most of don’t want to drive.
2) Infrastructure – shit infrastructure. The number of death traps here outside of cities or inside is astonishing. Whether it’s narrow bendy pot-hole infected goat trails with 0 hard shoulder and visibility at inappropriate speed limit or narrowed like no tomorrow city streets with 0 parking questionable junctions 3 sec traffic lights etc. Upgrades save lives – that’s a fact. Bypasses help pedestrians and cyclists – that’s a fact.
3) It’s not always carelessness, sometimes it’s a medical emergency or vehicle malfunction. Assumptions kill.
4) It’s NOT always drivers either. There are plenty of idiots everywhere. Jump in front of me at point blank, unless my speed is 0, there is literally nothing I can do but prey my brakes do the job.
5) So maybe, it’s a combination of factors?
I think there’s a multitude of reasons as to why deaths on the road are happening, but I think it’s important to also realise we have very low amounts of deaths, some of the safest in the world and our population has grown massively in a relatively short time here.
Our latest figures show that we’re driving about 47.3 billion km per year. I know putting statistics on something is fairly tragic, especially if you know someone that has passed from an accident, but the rate of road deaths last year was 3.68 deaths per million km driving. Now that is from 160 collisions and more collisions also result in injuries, but the rates are absolutely tiny in comparison to other countries. We have failings and driving standards have dropped it seems, but it is a sure sign that we are doing some things decently as a nation.
Ireland has a low rate of road deaths compared to the European average. Every death is a tragedy and we should always strive to lower than number more but it’s worth remembering because news sites are gonna clickbait tragedy.
>We try to rationalise these tragic losses by imagining them as freak accidents, a break from the norm, perhaps the result of a moment of carelessness.
Most car/bike/pedestrian journeys end successfully without any incident. So any incident is, by definition a break from the norm. To claim anything else is just incorrect.
>But cities like Oslo and Helsinki have already proven otherwise, achieving zero pedestrian or cyclist fatalities in recent years.
I can’t find any data to back up this claim. Norway has reduced road deaths but their aim at the moment is less than 50 deaths a year not vision Zero.
Norway’s figures are characterized by fatalities per million inhabitants. Ireland actually preforms reasonably ok on that metric: [https://road-safety.transport.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2024-01/erso-country-overview-2024-norway.pdf](https://road-safety.transport.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2024-01/erso-country-overview-2024-norway.pdf)
Irelands profile seems to follow most of Norway’s with the exception of cities. The density of traffic in Norway is very different from Ireland which helps.
The one stand out is that Norway issues far more speeding tickets that the rest of the EU. Approx 3X the average.
I’m not really sure what the article is pushing for here. Speed limits are being lowered. New infrastructure in a lot of cases segregates road users. This seems like a rant for the sake of it.
I drive an hour to work every day on a major road. I have not passed a Garda speed checkpoint in a few years. There are a number of van locations which regular users slow up for. The most dangerous thing I come across each day is when the fast driver meets the overly slow driver on stretches of road where they cannot overtake. The build up of tension causes major risks to be taken at the first opportunity. There needs to be greater enforcement at both ends of the speeding issue.
I’d love to see more detail being published on the accidents that do happen. If it was a plane or train accident, there would be more detail about what actually happened that led to the incident. But with road traffic incidents, they almost never mention any details except the mode of transport and the victim. Tell me the circumstances and I’ll bet its easy enough to see what’s going wrong. Easy stuff like driver visibility, road condition, suitability of the infrastructure, speed limits, safety gear, previous related incidents, etc.
On reading some of the comments, it seems that people are willing to accept a certain number of road-deaths annually because these numbers are lower per capita than those of many other countries. However, I feel that we should be aiming for zero road deaths.