Increase in road deaths - questions need to be asked

There are commenters here advocating that phones be confiscated, cars seized and lots of harsh draconian measures.

But in reality, the Irish psych is that the law shouldn't apply to me, only others.

And if I am caught.. how do I get out of it, what's the loophole.

Plenty of threads on here demonstrating that attitude.

This is a typical attempt to cover over a serious problem. Those are legal limits for learner drivers and professional drivers and the latter make a significant part of the mileage on the road. However, it is also clear that there is a strong or relationship between alcohol or drugs and accidents. If you stop people on all days at all times of the day then you will not find 37% with that amount of alcohol in their blood. Many people do not drink heavily and only have that level in their blood for less than 5% of the week, some others do drink at all or very rarely. As for cocaine, only 3% of Irish adults use cocaine in the year, and for many of those that use is not every week and certainly not every day. Even if it could be detected the day after or whatever even in that 3% there would be no detection on most days for most people. So having 13% of drivers in accidents with cocaine instead of 1.3% in the population is a huge indication of a problem.

Obviously other people in accidents did not have drugs in their blood, so there are other problems of bad driving. The diversity of these problems makes it hard to tackle, but we need checkpoints and and disqualifications and we need people found guilty of these offences to be required to use an in car breathalyser for a long period.

I'm not attempting to cover up a problem - it very clearly exits in that there are a disproportionate number of dead drivers who have intoxicants in their system. I'm pointing out that even when we know that, the data is continuously presented in a very cagey manner, with lots of omissions, and caveats which effectively state that a positive result may not mean impairment, and no link back to whether impairment was a causation factor in a collision.

1.3% might use cocaine, but when correlating for A) young drivers B) night time at the weekend C) outside cities with lack of public transport I suspect the number would more closely match. The studly below says 10.5% of 15-24yo used Cocaine in the last month, and we know that young people, at night, in rural area are involved in a greater number of fatal collisions.

https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/social-affairs/2022/06/08/cocaine-use-by-young-women-rising-significantly-study-finds/

Again, this it not to dismiss the problem, and perhaps the causation factor for 13% of fatal collisions on weekend nights IS cocaine, as opposed to just being a correlation with poor roads and poor driving training, but we can't tell that from the data either.

Without knowing that, then we can't know that enforcement alone would solve the problem, and dismiss infrastructure improvements and improved training.

Absolutely, just do that baseline in the same conditions. Really what I'm trying to get at here is that almost every collision has multiple causation factors, and eliminating drink for example wouldn't cut deaths by 37%

It seems to me that reading your contribution over multiple threads everyone other than yourself and cyclists in general are idiots. Must be nice to be on that pedestial

This is the kind of **** that annoys me when the likes of the RSA/Gardaí go on about how you can take responsibility for your own safety by wearing hi-viz/helmet etc. **** all good those things will do you when the likes of above ploughs through you. If they were engaged in good faith efforts to tackle the likes of above then fair enough but when there's **** all being done, then any well intentioned advice being given to the victims who are going to be knocked down and killed by these cretins is just patronising and infuriating.

Duplicate post, thanks to Vanilla upgrade screwing up handling of quotes.

We have a concentrated effort of speed vans and speed traps on the main roads fining people doing just over the speed limit.

Meanwhile in the sticks, theres footage from Sneem over the weekend of an 06-D Renault Modus driving on the wrong side of the road after crossing a continuous white line. Driver carries on through Sneem and when he stops and is challenged, he walks away. Couldn't give a toss.

This puts our 'doing incredibly well' into context.

Fully agree, we have a sizeable number of the population who will do what they can get away with. I think a great measure of a countries civility is if they can have honesty boxes and people don’t rob it or take the piss. I couldn’t see them working very well in Ireland unfortunately.

Back to our roads, I was out this morning and let a woman in a big BMW jeep out a junction so I was behind her for a portion of my journey home. First junction we met she was looking at her phone while waiting for the chance to go, didn’t bother indicating which way she was going, didn’t bother indicating at the next turn and same for the last one before we headed in different directions.

You must have missed the discussion that followed when another user first posted that infographic three weeks ago.

Have a look back at the top of page 15 of this thread, and you'll see how the European Commission (who published that infographic) also published the following table on the same day:

As I pointed out in that earlier discussion, the finding here is that even in spite of the percentage increase from 2019, Ireland is still one of the safest in terms of fatalities per population, with only five of the EU27 having a lower death rate and only three being significantly lower.

Please also refer to page 15 before coming back with one of your likely replies, as you'll probably find it was already dealt with there too.

Main point of that earlier discussion was reasonable people agreeing that one data point taken in isolation is often misleading. I know you've a long track record in either simply not understanding or not considering the broader statistical context, or perhaps deliberately misrepresenting it, but thankfully others have a greater understanding of such things.

None of which changes the dreadful facts that we've sat back and watched our road deaths rates climb by 31% over four years, and a further 25% this year to date, while other countries around Europe have mostly continued the downward reduction in deaths.

All drivers?

Please clarify.

You spent too much time watching Covid statistics few years ago.

People were dangerous virus bags that time, now they are dangerous drivers.

Every single one of them ?