Marc Ó Cathasaigh (Waterford, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

Something that has struck me in this debate so far is the emphasis on drivers only. Automobile traffic is the only thing that has been mentioned. Members have not spoken of the fact that many of the people who have died on our roads are either pedestrians or cyclists, nor has our definition of what we understand road safety to be been broadened to include all people. It reinforces for me the car-centric nature of the discussion and of the thinking of Members of this House when we think about road safety.

My eldest son started the cycle right training in school on Monday of this week. Our school, Glór na Mara National School in Tramore, pioneered cycle training before it was an official programme. The much-missed Dermot Blount used to come in to teach the kids the basics of how to check their bike, signal, check over their shoulder and do all the other basic things needed when taking a bike out onto the road. It was lovely to watch the kids respond to that and see the simple pleasure they got from sitting up on their bike and enjoying the spin.

What always terrified me as a teacher was not the lessons themselves or 30 children doing laps around the yard, even though that would set a teacher's nerves jangling. It was how the kids would get their bikes to school in the morning and whether they would safely make it as far as the school gates. What I saw before, and saw again last Monday, was parents unloading bikes from the boots of their cars and having their children wheel them in through the gates of the school. That is not a function of our school being in a rural area because it is not; it is in the heart of Tramore in an urban environment. Nor is it an issue of the children being far away. Our green schools committee has done all of the work on that. We know the vast majority of the children attending the school live within 2 km of it. The problem is that the road outside the primary school is just not safe enough.

I am reminded again of the old adage that one cannot prove the need for a bridge by counting how many people are swimming across the river. Likewise, there are very few drownings in shark-infested waters. We are asking our children to go and swim with the sharks when we tell them to walk and cycle to school.

I fully support the cycle right programme and what it teaches about bike handling, road awareness and so on. However, when I leave my son off to cycle to school, I am not worried about his cycling skills but I am worried about cars. More specifically, I am worried about drivers who breeze through pedestrian crossings and close-pass people and about distracted drivers who are looking down at their phone. I am also worried about the Road Safety Authority which perpetuates a system and culture that places the responsibility for the simple act of getting to and from school on the pedestrian and cyclist. In preparing for today's contribution I came across the RSA's going to school leaflet from 2017, which opens with two pieces of advice. The first is the statement that research shows that children under the age of 12 should not cross roads on their own but should be taken to school by a responsible adult. The second was that children should wear high visibility clothing when out walking. Our Road Safety Authority is telling parents that walking to school is too dangerous an activity to be done without adult supervision and, even when supervised by an adult, it requires specialist safety equipment. I read this document as a stinging self-indictment of the RSA and its failure to make our roads and streets safer for some of our most vulnerable road users.

The RSA is a firm believer in people dressing up in funny clothes, even on footpaths and in broad daylight. That is why it spent €240,000 on personal protective equipment, PPE, in November last year alone. In one month, it spent nearly a quarter of a million euro. I want to see the cost-benefit analysis for that type of expenditure. I want to see the underpinning research that shows that road safety is significantly improved in some meaningful way from that kind of investment. The RSA is refusing to release anonymised collision data, on which I welcome the Minister of State's comments. If it can be done in other jurisdictions, surely to God it can be done here. That would help local authorities to make meaningful evidence-based decisions on road safety interventions. The RSA is still spending hundreds of thousands of euro on high-visibility vests and continues to place responsibility for road safety on those who are least responsible. That is one of the reasons I have written to the Chair of the Committee of Public Accounts to ask that the RSA appear before the committee to account for its spending. The other reason is that, incredibly, in the 18 years since its foundation in 2006, the RSA has not once appeared before the Committee of Public Accounts.

The other measure I am calling for today is one that falls within the Minister of State's compass. It is for an expansion of the membership of the ministerial road safety committee. As I understand it, that committee currently comprises the Minister of State, the Minister for Justice and representatives of the RSA, the Medical Bureau of Road Safety, Transport Infrastructure Ireland and An Garda Síochána. It should be expanded to include representatives of the Local Government Management Agency, LGMA and, crucially, the National Transport Authority, who would include active travel in their remit. I would also like to see the Minister of State with responsibility for public health, Deputy Colm Burke, attend those meetings. This would broaden the remit of the committee to ensure we do not fall into the trap of taking an extremely car-centric approach to issues of road safety, as we have seen in much of this debate. A safe road cannot just be one where there is an absence of fatalities. We need to measure what a healthy and safe road is differently. We need to measure how many children can walk and cycle safely on that road and how many older people feel comfortable to walk or cycle on it. Does a street network meet universal design standards? We need this type of thinking, not just how fast can people drive on the road and how much better we can make the roads. We need that type of thinking as opposed to purely car-centric thinking if we are to make a meaningful difference on road safety.

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