Road safety - We must not become complacent

ON well over 300 days a year, no child is killed on the roads, but that is not considered news. When a child is killed, however, it is news, because it is a tragedy.

Such reporting leads to disillusionment among those charged with road safety. There are more cars than ever on our roads, and many rural roads are narrow and winding, with a growing number of potholes to distract drivers, so the hazards are worse than ever.

But the latest figures published by Road Safety Authority (RSA) indicate that child fatalities on our roads was down by a staggering 45.6% between 1997 and 2009. There was 36% decease in pedestrian fatalities, 60% decrease in cyclist fatalities, and 73% decrease in child fatalities among car passengers.

Over one-third of the fatalities, 37%, were passengers, as were 44% of those children seriously injured. The majority of fatalities took place between 4pm and 7pm.

Over a quarter of the fatalities, or 26%, occurred in Dublin and Cork, and about half of that number in other built-up areas, but 61% of the child fatalities occurred outside of built-up areas where the speed limit was higher than 60km/h.

The RSA and ESB Electric Ireland should be commended for their alliance to promote road safety with their Be Safe, Be Seen campaign. ESB Electric Ireland is sponsoring 80,000 high visibility vests that will be distributed to every child starting school this autumn.

From 1997 to 2009, some 246 children up to the age of 14 died on our roads, and a further 1,013 were seriously injured. But the statistics can be misleading. The 7 children killed in 2004 were, for instance, the lowest of any year. The 12 killed in 2009 were therefore an increase of over 71%.

A more realistic comparison would be to contrast the total figures for the six years, 1998 to 2003, with the six years from 2004 to 2009. Deaths were down from 139 to 80, a 42.4% decrease, between the two periods, and serious injuries declined from 541 to 337, or 37.7%.

Although the figures are impressively lower, they still mask an enormous amount of grief, and it is vital that parents and teachers stress the importance of road safety for children. As children will inevitably act like children, it is even more important to stress the need for drivers, especially young drivers, to expect the unexpected.

In 2008, the RSA found that 26% of primary school children were not wearing seatbelts. One still sees children standing in the back of a car. Drivers who tolerate such behaviour should be put off the road. Children allowed to stand in a car are not only being recklessly endangered, but so also is every other road user. Such children may momentarily distract the driver with disastrous consequences for themselves and anyone else in the vicinity.

While there has been an impressive improvement on our road safety, there is certainly no room for complacency.