Róisín Garvey (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire Stáit chuig an Teach. I was delighted to hear some of the announcements he made recently around speed reduction and I thank him for that. I worked full-time for 12 years on behavioural change around car use before I became a Senator. I have worked with town, city, and village schools, and those up the mountain and where nobody else is around. The number one issue was the number of cars on the roads. Sometimes, the cars were only the parents' cars and there were no other cars on those particular roads. The two single biggest causes of accidents in this country are the number of cars and the speed at which they move. Speed alone is one factor but the quantity of cars is another. We advertise that "speed kills" on big huge signs on motorways. We have been advertising that for about 40 or 50 years but we have not done anything about reducing the speeds. That is why I was really happy with some of the announcements the Minister of State has made. We have also advertised accident black spots where people have been killed but these have not been changed infrastructurally in any way. The Road Safety Authority, RSA, goes around the country on tour promoting a campaign to highlight the 20 places a person can be on a bike around a truck and not be seen and we have not done anything about that either. We still let trucks go through every little village and town, and every narrow street. The number one cause of accidents in towns and cities is trucks turning left and not seeing cyclists.

We are out there promoting all the dangers but now we need to start promoting what we are going to do about them. It is something I have seen done well in other countries. They have taken trucks out of city and town centres. I am not saying trucks should not be allowed to make deliveries but maybe they could deliver to the outskirts. We see that UPC are downsizing into small e-cargo vans and bikes and are delivering around the city in that way. It saves the company money, it is quicker, and it is a lot less dangerous for people who are trying to move around the city without being worried about heavy goods vehicle, HGVs. Reducing the access we give to trucks is something we should definitely look at. I would love to see trucks and vans being fined for parking wherever they want, all day and night. I have had to come off my bike so many times, in this city in particular. Often, there is a loading bay across the road but God forbid the truck drivers would have to park somewhere they are supposed to, stock up the stuff and cross the road. They are not all bad but we have to call out the bad behaviour at the same time.

We have to introduce speed limits of 30 km per hour in all villages, town centres and housing estates. The speed limit is not even 30 km/h in housing estates where the kids want to play. The Love 30 campaign has been going for years. I used to do guerilla signposting of Love 30 by taking a red heart and writing 30 on it and putting it up outside schools. It was very bold and I should not have done that. When we were trying to get the cars to slow down I used to do guerilla signposting of 30 with a heart around it because 50 km/h is too fast a speed outside a school, as is 60 km/h, and results in accidents outside schools. A speed limit of 30 km/h is what works. One out of ten pedestrians gets killed at 30 km; four in ten at 50 km; and nine out of ten at 60 km. If reducing fatalities is not a good enough reason to reduce speed limits, I do not know what is.

We should also raise all pedestrian crossings because when they are flush with the road, cars just go through them. They do it all the time. I have looked at many pedestrian crossings around my county and I have got some of them raised. It is a game-changer. When people are in their cars, they are not as connected to the people around them. They are more concerned about minding their cars for which they paid loads of money and are really afraid of ramps and bumps. These are cheap and they work. Flush pedestrian crossings do not work. I used one yesterday and three cars went through it. We have to look at that as well.

There is a huge issue then around the speed limits on the boundaries of villages of towns. I live in the middle of nowhere so I am going to focus on rural issues, apart from giving Dublin traffic and truck drivers a bad name. Down in Clare, we have all these 60 km/h limits. There is a 60 km/h limit through my village. I do not know why it is 60 km/h limit through any village because even if it is not a big village, people still live there. We have a woman and a man living 150 m from the shop who have to drive to the shop. They are 90 years old. The woman's husband still drives her. When he stops driving, she will be going nowhere. She cannot go outside her door and walk 150 m. I tried to get a footpath and the local authority said I would have to get one that was 4 m wide because two wheelchairs have to be able to pass each other out. The local authority would have to issue a compulsory purchase order, CPO, for lots of land. I do not know what the priority is anymore because I see the local authority CPOing land for motorways but we will not do it for a footpath that will connect people to their village or town. We may have to look at that. I do not want to be CPOing land anywhere but it is amazing how we do it for motorways which are approximately 12 m deep, and a whole mountain has to be blown up to put in a road, but we will not CPO the edge at the side of the road for a safe footpath for people to walk on.

I wanted to flag something else in my final minute. We are going back to trucks again unfortunately. We had a fatality a mile from where I live. A lovely three-year-old girl was killed by a truck driver who was trying to overtake a bus on a bend. Her father tried to save her and she was killed. Not only was that absolutely tragic and her father ended up in hospital for many months and still has an acquired brain injury, but the truck driver lost his licence for two years, appealed it, and is now back driving trucks. If we are not going to punish people for absolutely insane behaviour that leads to death, why would people not take risks? We have to look at the justice side of things as well. It might be something for the RSA to see what the rules are around that because it is giving licences back to people way sooner than they should get them. If people are afraid of losing their licences, they might drive more carefully.

As an add-on to that story, two students who were madly in love were sitting on a wall three days after doing their leaving certificate and were killed by a truck in our county town. Two days later, a woman sitting in her car in a hard shoulder was killed by a truck. These were four people in our county killed by trucks in one week, namely, a three-year-old, two young teenagers, and a lady sitting in a stationary car, and nobody spoke about that. Nobody connected the dots and asked what we were doing letting these mad big vehicles drive at crazy speeds and kill our people. I have a friend who is a truck driver and he is a great one but we have to look at this issue. The bigger the vehicle on the road, the more of a threat it is to people. Trucks do not have a greater right to the road. They are of greater danger on the roads. We have to turn this upside down and put people, bikes, old people, people with disabilities, and children who want to cycle and walk, first, and put the trucks last. There has to be something done about that because it is leading to death and it is just horrendous. A motorcyclist was killed on his bike in Ballyvaughan and the speed limit signpost was on a bend. We have these signposts on bends because somebody in Dublin decided that was where they should go. I am glad to see that the Minister of State is looking at speed limits but people are dying as a result of poor infrastructure and design around speeds and roads.