Tolls increase danger on secondary roads
The legislature has launched strategy after strategy on road safety, with little funding to implement them.
We have the fiasco of penalty points, broken down speed cameras and the cratered tracks that pass for many secondary roads.
The NRA, in conjunction with the Department of the Environment, has again increased road tolls another stealth tax that will result in more traffic, and more casualties, on our already overcrowded secondary roads.
The motorist has already paid for the entire cost of the toll charges many times over through excessive taxes in the form of VAT, VRT, road fund licence, insurance levies and fuel taxes.
The Government cannot continue to bleed motorists and hauliers dry. They are not objecting to paying for the use of the roads. Millions have been collected in toll charges by the NRA, with little return to the motoring public.
In an effort to have our secondary roads properly surfaced and drained, and bends removed, some of the massive NRA toll funding should be diverted for this work in order to make secondary roads safer.
Young drivers have to pay exorbitant motor insurance rates and I welcome the establishment of the Motor Insurance Advisory Board to ascertain how rates can best be reduced for them?
If young drivers are accident-free even for a relatively short period, their insurance costs should be reduced substantially. While we penalise young drivers in the South, motorists of any age from Northern Ireland can drive like the clappers on our roads. There is no way of bringing them to book as one cannot extradite a person for a traffic offence.
This is another road hazard that needs to be eliminated.
With stealth taxes, inadequate funding for secondary roads and other related problems, is it any wonder motoring is now so deadly dangerous?
Thanks to Eddie Shaw for highlighting this life-and-death issue, and good luck to him for the future.
Cllr Noel Collins
Midleton
Co Cork
