Gardaí to take part in Europe-wide speeding crackdown

GARDAÍ will take part in a Europe-wide crackdown on speeding next week ahead of the May bank holiday.

Operation Speed, coordinated by the European Traffic Police Network TISPOL, comes as new statistics show young drivers, particularly males, are still more likely to be involved in car crashes and die on the roads.

While the number of fatalities so far this year is down 12 compared with the same period last year, 57 people have still died on the roads, including 11 drivers aged between 17 and 30.

This comes as Gardaí revealed that preliminary results from a psychological study of young drivers also highlighted differences between men and women behind the wheel.

Sgt Jim McAllister of the Dublin Regional Traffic Division said a study being conducted in the Psychology Department in Trinity College Dublin had asked a series of hypothetical questions of young people, specifically regarding a situation where they took their parents’ car and had a crash.

On being asked what their over-riding concerns would be in such a situation, the majority of females said death and serious injury would be their main worry.

Males, however, responded by saying the Gardaí being called, their parents being contacted and damage to the car was the over-riding concern, indicating the differences in perception between young men and women when it came to road traffic collisions.

Gardaí warned that May last year was the single worst month in 2009, with 29 people killed on our roads.