Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak in this debate and it is obviously a follow-on from a debate last week with regard to driver testing times.

I mentioned in that debate that it is the clearest way of showing that people have earned the competency to drive on the road safely. However, we also have to be acutely aware that drivers are not the only road users. Obviously, there are pedestrians, recreational walkers and people on bikes. Increasingly we are seeing e-scooters, e-bikes, cargo bikes and everything in between, including buses and light rail. Figures published by An Garda Síochána on Tuesday indicate that, to date this year, 154 people have been killed on the roads. That is obviously part of the reason we are discussing this today. The trend, as the Minister of State knows, is going in the wrong direction. If we take the year-on-year figures for deaths for this point in the year, it is up 36 additional deaths over 2020 and 42 over the next truly comparable year, which is 2019.

The announcement by the Minister for Justice of an additional €1.2 million to An Garda Síochána earlier this year for mobile safety camera deployments and road monitoring hours for the duration of 2023, while it is welcome, is no panacea and should not be projected as such. This has to be targeted. It strikes me at times that the GoSafe plan on the M50 is not really detecting what it should. It is certainly detecting people who are speeding but it is not in an area in which we are seeing significant road deaths. The arguments that are made for segregated roads are that they are safer. That is where we are most likely to see these cameras. If we start looking at where the fatalities are happening, very often they are happening in areas in which it would not be safe to put one of these vehicles on the side of the road.

The number of dedicated road police members in the policing unit was 659 nationally as of August this year. County Kildare, for example, which has two of the State's busiest motorways, has 26 officers. I recall a county engineer in County Kildare doing an analysis of the traffic through Kildare. A total of 80% of all the traffic coming from or going to Dublin comes through Kildare because the M4, M7 and M9 account for so much of the national traffic. If we are looking at just 26 officers working 24-7, it gives some indication of the adequacy.

I remember once doing a study that looked at all the hot spots at which fines where applied. In fact, the area in which a person was most likely to get fined for speeding was between the Red Cow roundabout and the Kildare county boundary, which is a three-lane segregated road with quite a decent road safety profile. We must look at the evidence. Unfortunately, it is to be noted that those statistics to which I referred show that 85 drivers and passengers have been killed in just over ten months this year. Worryingly, 38 pedestrians have been killed. Aside from the road deaths, there is obviously huge emotional damage for their families that will last their lives. There are also very significant injuries, however. We can see that in rehabilitation units in hospitals and the central rehabilitation unit.

I will come back to the earlier point of road users. The latest figures do not reflect the totality of the issue. In July, I asked the Minister to provide figures for traffic collisions that were logged on the PULSE system as "fatal" or "serious" relating to users of e-bikes and e-scooters, for example. There were 54 persons in that category that covered the period 2022 to the end of June 2023. Increasingly, we are also seeing a different kind of injury with vehicles like e-scooters. There have not been any adequate road safety initiatives or even a campaign to try to alert people to what to watch out for or how to use the road safely with different vehicles, or these new vehicles at least.

The focus on road safety must include all road users' behaviour, including motor vehicle drivers' behaviour, and a general awareness by all. Obviously, at schools level, there are a number of initiatives, such as Be Safe in primary school and Let’s Go at primary and second level. The latter, however, is designed for teachers - it is not actually for pupils - for events that would be held in which children take part. I know this week from talking to parents that senior infants in some schools are taking part in An Taisce’s green schools travel flag programme with the emphasis on giving kids a fun 50-minute session on scooter safety and skills. That kind of thing is a very good initiative. We want to see more of that at a very early stage. Moving on, there could be scope for a full-time model during transition year at second level for students who at some point will be commuting and which would cover all modes of transport.

Of course, I welcome the emphasis emerging with regard to prioritising active travel.

See this speech in context