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“WITH VISION ZERO, we have the potential to spare hundreds of families from grief and suffering.”
Last year, the government launched a new ten-year road safety strategy – Vision Zero – which “marks a new era for road safety in Ireland,” says Sam Waide, CEO of the Road Safety Authority.
“Vision Zero has been designed with victims of road crashes and bereaved families in mind,” he says. “It’s the government’s commitment to have no deaths or serious injuries on our roads by 2050.
In my time as CEO, I’ve spoken to many victims of crashes. Hearing the harrowing stories of bereaved families and survivors of road traffic collisions offers a solemn reminder of why the Road Safety Authority does what it does and why the emergency services and other road safety bodies do what they do.
Ireland’s approach to road safety has come on hugely in recent decades. The country’s first road safety strategy was not published until 1998. In 1997, one year before, the country had 474 road deaths, the highest figure in seven years.
“Since that first strategy, road deaths have declined by 70%, and Ireland has gone from a country with a poor road safety record to one among the best in Europe,” says Waide.
“While this progress is welcome, it is not nearly enough. Just as we can now look back on progress made in previous decades and wonder how we accepted 1998 behaviours on our roads, I hope that come 2030 and 2050 we will look back and wonder how we tolerated such high levels of deaths and injuries.
The “first step” towards achieving this goal is Ireland’s Road Safety Strategy for 2021-2030. The target for 2030 is to reduce road deaths and serious injuries on Irish roads by 50%.
The Road Safety Strategy 2021-2030 will be delivered in three phases. Phase 1, which runs from 2021 to 2024, is backed by a projected €3.8bn investment and includes 50 high-impact actions and 136 support actions, says Waide.
Each of these actions is being delivered in participation and collaboration with a number of stakeholders across the country, including the government, An Garda Siochana, health and safety organisations, emergency services, infrastructure and transport stakeholders.
Among the high-impact actions is the consideration of the introduction of a 30km/h default speed limit in urban areas, exploring the potential of an online portal for road users to upload footage of road traffic offences which could assist in prosecution, and the construction of 1,000km of segregated walking and cycling facilities across the country by 2025. You can see the full list of actions here.
Another key element to achieving Vision Zero is embedding the Safe System approach into our national road safety policy and practice, says Waide.
“The approach recognises that while road safety education and training can reduce the number of road collisions, human error cannot be eliminated. It aims to reduce the likelihood of a collision occurring and, if one does occur, to ensure that the road users involved will not be killed or seriously injured.”
There are seven areas of intervention in the Safe System approach, including; safe roads and roadsides, safe speeds, safe vehicles, safe road use, post-crash response, safe and healthy modes of travel, and safe work-related road use. Find out more about this approach here.
Alongside what the government, Road Safety Authority and other organisations have committed to deliver, Vision Zero “is for all road users,” says Waide. “Vision Zero in road safety is not just a catchphrase, it is a serious commitment to end all deaths and serious injuries on our roads.
“Partnership, collaboration and shared responsibility is critical in achieving the ambitious target of Vision Zero.”
“Everyone has a role to play. There are still far too many road users demonstrating dangerous behaviours.” These include speeding, not wearing a seat belt, driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs, using a mobile phone and not looking out for vulnerable road users, explains Waide.
“When it comes to vulnerable road users – pedestrians and cyclists – it’s about being seen, wearing a helmet and obeying traffic signals and not taking any undue risks.
Behaviour change is “key” to us achieving our 2030 targets and “ultimately in making Vision Zero a reality,” says Waide. “This is an ambitious goal but by working together, we can realise the vision of zero deaths on Ireland’s roads. The prize is immense and worthy.”
Learn more about making Vision Zero, Ireland’s new Road Safety Strategy for 2021-2030, a reality here.
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Step 1: Make petrol and diesel prohibitively expensive.
@Greg Ward: great because electric cars don’t cause crashes and prohibitively expensive petrol along with prohibitively expensive electric cars means no cars on the road. As well as electric cars and batteries don’t use any CO2 when building them or destroying unusable petrol cars doesn’t wasn’t energy. You should be president.
@Simon: Maybe his “Step 2″ was to make electricity prohibitively expensive?
@Simon:
Can’t hear one coming
Be no bother to you. Green party are going to have us all off the road in any case!
What people miss out is that the government tax safety features in cars as if they were a luxury item. Just like before abs brakes became mandatory. The customer had to pay extra for ABS . Assistive steering etc all taxed as if they were leather seats. All safety features should be mandatory in vehicles
@Matthew Balfe: exactly there’s VAT on motorcycle helmets.
@Matthew Balfe: There’s a huge range of safety systems available. Some make a significant improvements (seatbelts, front & side airbags), some make minor improvements (seatbelt airbags and rear window airbags). It only makes sense to make the most important items mandatory or cars become unreasonably expensive for minor gains in safety. People then keep older less safe cars because they can’t afford newer safer cars and the benefits of the new technologies are negated.
It is physically impossible to reach 0 road deaths. Human error will always cause accidents , tiredness, lack of concentration and just bad driving.
Letting computers and driverless cars will also not solve people stepping in front of them. Software glitches etc will add to this.
An unobtainable goal
@Mitch Healy: ah well, let’s not bother trying then.
@Mitch Healy: You are of course right. Something is always going to go wrong somewhere. I suppose “we’re aiming for 1-10 road deaths a year” doesn’t really have the same ring to it
Give Garda adequate resources to allow targeted speed monitoring on Local Roads
@Peter Cuthbert: you think speed is the only thing that causes road accidents?the 30km limits around Dublin are already ridiculously slow and actually difficult to keep under in a modern car
@pkunzip doom2.zip: Speed limiters for all cars?
@Peter Cuthbert: During COVID the Gardai we very active and visible.
No that COVID restrictions are gone I don’t not see any Gardai…
Where are they gone?
@pkunzip doom2.zip: Speed is absolutely the only thing that causes road accidents. If vehicles, roads, walls etc have no speed relative to each other, then they can’t hit each other! As their relative speed increases, so does the number and severity of accidents.
@ChronicAnxiety: Speed limiters ?? it’s called the brake pedal ! (LHS of accelerator or middle pedal)
@Mickey Finn: You sound like an RSA stooge – all they care about is Speed and speeding enforcement, because it’s easy to make important what you can measure, but harder to measure what’s actually important. Sure, excessive speed for the conditions is a factor in many crashes, but simply lowering speed limits in urban areas without redesigning the urban street scape is totally pointless (but it’s cheap and easy, and makes people think you’re doing something). Besides speed, consider road design that intrinsically protects all road users, driver/rider education, enforcement of driving standards (besides speed), legislation protecting vulnerable road users – none of those avenues are being addressed in any meaningful way, it’s all speed and speeding, because it’s simplistic and makes for easy PR on “National Slow-Down Day”.
@Mickey Finn: rarely does speed cause an accident but it is the largest contributing factor. Even the RSA rephrased their use of the word speed.
@Tadhg Lehane: and, accident has been removed from the lexicon. It’s collisions now, and has been for about 15 years. Also, removing accident doesn’t imply intent. This is a fact, talk to the dept, tii and all the road safety engineers.
@Type17: (a) I’m not a stooge, (b) I was being somewhat pedantic & (c) I agree that just putting up speed limit signs without a wider range of measures is not effective. While relative velocity is the reason things hit each other, there are many ways of preventing it becoming a problem.
@TomTraubert: The updating of the lexicon you identified seems to me a bit like counting the number of angels that can dance on the head of the pin. The problem is people, cars, bikes, trucks, walls, etc hitting off each other. Does the label we put on the above make much of a difference?
@Mickey Finn: yep, accident normalises things and suggests nothing could have been done. As I said, ask them.
Step 2. Replace airbag with 8″ chief knife.
Step 3. Retest everyone every 5 years.
Step 4. Make every car equivalent to 80hp.
Four billion Euro to save how many “auto related” lives!
Redirect the €4B towards reducing all premature deaths in the country, not just auto related!
Chasing the auto related deaths down to zero will have an almighty opportunity cost!
So many ways to better spend that money but sadly I’m certain our politicians are not capable of making the necessary U turn.
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Other -in not too many years, the government/auto industry will be able to sync vehicle speeds with required local speed limits….require vehicles to self report violations, etc etc so RSA take the foot of the pedal and let technology deliver your dream state of total control by 2040 for a fraction of the cost.
@D Doherty: If the Government and RSA actually got their act together, they could do this – look at the video linked below and see how the Netherlands has designed their junctions since the early 80′s – note that they didn’t have much cycling walking infrastructure back then, but they didn’t blow loads of money ripping out junctions etc, but whenever junctions and streets were revised/re-laid/worked on, they were raised to the current, better standards – thus over a few decades, they have some of the safest roads in the world, and vision zero is actually within their reach. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpQMgbDJPok
@Type17: that’s ok there all the bikes stopped at the red light not like here
@Alan Wilson: Snore…
Living in cloud cuckoo land
Having NCT/CVRT centres assessing their own Motor Repairs is an absurd idea and puts safety in second place!
@Fabian Lee: Should we set up a separate organisation that checks repairs identified by the NCT centers? An NCTT centre? “An absurd idea” might be a bit strong, given that the problem you’ve identified can be addressed by quality control and training.
Safe roads. At the rate they’re going it will be long after 2050 before all roads are made safe. Motorways and National roads are generally kept in good condition but R and L roads are often left to a shovel full of filling once a month. Condition of roads should be a high priority and that includes road markings.
These guys are pure useless and let me explain why. Today car manufacturers build cars of various specs and options. The people who can afford new cars are generally elderly people and the dealerships here make cars specs really basic. The govt on top taxes all car extras including safety features, ie cameras, lane assist, emergency breaking, adaptive cruise control ect ect.
99% of new cars sold today in Ireland have all safety features removed from the spec. All your left with is abs. There are cars in Ireland 25 years old that have that.
You want to make the roads safer add more safety technology to the cars. Make it mandatory and remove the taxs off the options.
136 killed on Ireland’s road in 2021, so far this year 38 fatalities, 20 more than the same period last year. Do the RSA have a clue?
@Murray Mitchell: Ask yourself how many million km will be driven this year, compared to last year, with all the lockdowns and WFH? Sounds like you don’t have much of a clue (about statistics).
@Type17: Only a 1% increase in travel between 2016 & 2019 (https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-nts/nationaltravelsurvey2019/overviewandkeyfindings/) Given Covid and the lockdowns you can extrapolate that kms traveled have decreased, yet fatalities and collisions have increased.
The video linked below shows how Vision Zero is really achieved – given their obsession with speed limits, speeding and ‘warnings of actual enforcement this bank-holiday weekend’ press-releases, does anyone here really think the Irish Government/RSA/Local Authorities have the capacity to implement these principles? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aNtsWvNYKE
Meanwhile everyone just plods along in the middle lane of the m50 and the RSA never mention that and guards never enforce correct lane usage.
@Chimo Spinola: Members of CLOG (Centre Lane Owners Group) are also especially active on the M7/N7 between the M50 and M9 junctions – millions of € were spent adding an extra lane to this road, only for these muppets to effectively make it a two-lane road again.
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