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

Road safety must remain an absolute priority for all of us. I welcome most aspects of the Bill. I have some difficulties with elements of it, which are not terribly different from the ones that have just been highlighted.

Part 2 of the Bill seeks to overhaul the way penalty points are applied, or certainly the number of them that can be imposed at any given time. Under the new regime, a person who is alleged to have been detected committing a series of offences will incur cumulative sanctions. That is an important deterrent. In January 2024, according to the Road Safety Authority, more than 500,000 penalty points were applied to licences, 26,000 of them in the county where I live.

I will break those numbers down. More than 380,000 drivers were hit with three penalty points in a single instance. The current range of offences that incur three penalty points covers things like speeding, dangerous overtaking, not wearing a seatbelt, dangerous overtaking of a cyclist and driving without a valid NCT. However, offences like speeding can be combined with offences such as dangerous overtaking and there will now be a clear way to sanction those in tandem. The changes proposed are logical in that you are breaching a multiplicity of road traffic offences. Drivers will face a tougher sanction for doing that. I am not sure how many people make multiple breaches of the road traffic laws in one go, but the proposed changes will give people something to think about and will certainly be a deterrent. It will hopefully change behaviour. We are not looking for more people to get penalty points. We are looking for people to think about how they will avoid penalty points through this being a sanction, and their being aware of it. This will hang on detection and enforcement, which will depend, in addition to the GoSafe vans, on resourcing of Garda units that follow this up. The vans only detect speed. Resourcing of police road units is the only way if there will be a multiplicity of offences prosecuted. The only way to do that will be for the road policing to be sufficient to do it. Even seeing the Garda vehicles of the traffic corps can be a deterrent in its own right.

The 2014 Act was amended by the Road Traffic and Roads Act 2023. Among other things this extended insurers' access to endorsement details to include disqualifications. Again, that was obviously quite important and I am not sure everybody really appreciates that. In late 2023 I asked about the relevant section of the 2023 Act, which had not yet commenced. Will the Minister of State provide us with an update of when that will happen?. It is one thing for us to pass legislation. It is another thing for that legislation to be signed into law or enacted. I absolutely see the merit of the proposed changes to intoxicant testing, which will put the testing regime on the same footing as alcohol. Any substance that impairs a driver's ability to concentrate effectively or operate a vehicle in a safe manner has to be interrogated. There will of course be exceptions for those with a certified medical condition.

I turn to speed limits. There is a degree of confusion about this. If I start driving on the M4 at Leixlip, that is 120 km/h. I then go on to the N4, which is 80 km/h. I then go onto the N4 at the Chapelizod bypass, which is 60 km/h. It then goes back up to 80 km/h. It is a segregated road. I know you will be coming towards junctions, but you will not be going down the Chapelizod bypass. I do not think that makes a lot of sense. If you are looking for where you are most likely to see a speed camera, you are more likely to see it on some of the safest roads in the country. You are likely to see it on the N4, the M7, the M9 or the M1 and in places where a location is provided to put one of those vans. The roads it is most difficult to get those vans on are the ones where you are most likely to see accidents. That kind of makes a mockery of detecting. That does not just include the vans but also traffic police who are out with what are known as hairdryers as a way to measure speed. However, you only really see it in safe locations. That would give you pause for thought about some of the locations. Another issue is traffic accidents. The most likely time for traffic accidents is not 4 a.m. - it is peak morning and evening. You can hear that on the morning and evening traffic reports. There will tend to be a lot of accidents, but they will not be major ones. The ones where you get people speeding is where there is no traffic on the road. That is at different times of the day. There is sometimes a feeling that it is fish in a barrel with regard to some locations and speeding tickets, which is where there are safe, segregated roads - some of the widest roads in the country. When you design a road and want to reduce speed, you do not have a wide expanse, you narrow people's vision. That is part of the reason traffic calming is done in such a way that you narrow vision and people naturally reduce speed. There is a difficulty when we provide good roads, which have a speed limit that is maybe lower than a boreen which has an 80 km/h speed limit. That kind of conflict confuses people as to the approach.

Every five years local authorities have to do a plan. The last time they did one in County Kildare - I think there is a new one due soon - my councillor colleagues on Kildare County Council had an issue with some of the direction they were being given. They argued it would make some of the roads less safe in some of the locations where the speed limit was to be increased from 60 km/h to 80 km/h. Some of this was around a sports centre where there was a lot of activity with youngsters going in and out. There were major rows where there was no flexibility. The councillors were constantly told this was a national scheme so there would be coherence for drivers, but people know their own localities. Some of what was pointed out to the council did change, but it took a battle to change it. There has to be some degree of flexibility where it is patently obvious there will be a problem if the speed limit is increased in an area with a lot of pedestrian and vulnerable traffic. I am concerned this flexibility will end up not being applied. You can obviously engineer out speed zones where they are deemed to be dangerous. Councillors were told that engineering solutions, traffic calming or whatever could be put in place, but there were no budgets to do it. These things have to be accompanied by more than a guideline that is pretty much mandatory around the country for coherence. It has to be accompanied by the ability to deal with some of the obvious shortcomings of the road system that will lead to accidents.

I agree with some of the previous speakers about better options for public transport. I tell the Minister of State that I am sick and tired of talking about the shortcomings of BusConnects. There are some good things with BusConnects, but when there are shortcomings they are monumental. They pretty much eliminate a service for some people. As far as I am concerned the NTA does not want to hear about it. They will tell you before they put the service in that you should go back to them and they can do this, that and the other. When you go back to them you will be completely dismissed. The people who are most likely to be impacted by that are older people and people who have less ability to get on and off several buses.

I will not lose an opportunity to make that point because I think there are failings in BusConnects that are impeding people from using a service they might have been able to use previously. We need to look seriously at that because the more people we can put on public transport the better, thereby reducing the number of cars on the road and obviously reducing accident rates as well. That needs to be part of the mix.

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