Road fatality figures are a poor indicator of road safety

Back in 2019 Ireland was named the second safest European Union Member State by the European Transport Safety Council (ETSC) and received the ETSC’s Road Safety Performance Index award recognising “continued progress on road safety”. And on the face of it, the award was well deserved having seen a reduction of 30% in road fatalities since 2010 and a reduction of almost 60% since the establishment of the Road Safety Authority in 2006.

But even at that time there were grumblings as to how accurate this assessment was, especially from people who cycle regularly on Irish Roads. 2017 had seen a ten year high in the number of people killed while cycling and there were increasing calls for investment in safe cycling infrastructure by campaigners and activists. In that context, the road safety claims were treated with considerable scepticism. As one commentator put it “it’s like saying no-one has drowned in my shark-infested swimming pool”.

One metric that wasn't being measured, or at least not in the context of road safety, was the people who are not using the roads because of safety concerns. In the Netherlands, 75% of secondary school students cycle to school regularly. In Ireland that figure was closer to 2% at that time, yet the fatalities data was telling us that Ireland's roads were safer than those of the Netherlands.

In 2019, the National Transport Authority published the Dublin Metropolitan Area Bike Life report. It reported that 21% of adults don't cycle but would like to, and noted safety concerns as the primary reason for people not cycling. This statistic has been repeated in the subsequent annual Walking & Cycling Index and has been echoed in the Walking and Cycling Index reports for other Irish cities. The 2023 Galway report found that "safety, including road safety and personal safety, is the single largest barrier to cycling".

Aside from the issue of people being dissuaded from using the roads there are fundamental issues with the reliance on fatality figures alone to inform our road safety strategy. The fatality figures are widely published in the media but what gets less coverage is the extent of injuries to road users, especially those walking and cycling. And those figures tell quite a different story.

The figures available for road injuries over the last two decades show a stubbornly consistent level of around 8,000 injuries per year since 2004 with a reduction during covid lockdown which corresponds to a reduction in the number of cars on the road. And if we look at the number of serious injuries within that the trends are even more worrying. The number of people seriously injured on Irish roads in 2019 was the highest in two decades and was three times higher than the figure for 2011. People walking and cycling have consistently made up about 40% of all serious injuries on Irish roads over the last decade, vastly disproportionate to their numbers on the road.

People walking and cycling have consistently made up about 40% of all serious injuries on Irish roads over the last decade, vastly disproportionate to their numbers on the road.

Somehow the narrative around Road Safety in Ireland seems to be that we were doing quite well up until the pandemic lockdown and then something happened which changed driver behaviour to such an extent that it is now reversing the gains made. The figures for serious injuries just don't support that narrative at all. True, there has been a reduction in the number of people being killed, and that is of course to be welcomed, but we can't ignore the devastating, life-changing impacts of serious injuries.

Nor can we ignore the message that the recent trends in those figures is telling us. Relatively speaking, the number of people being killed is low, but this makes it less reliable statistically as a measure of road safety. A better measure, and one used internationally, is to combine the figures for those killed and those seriously injured into one data set (KSIs). This gives us a more complete picture of the impact of road violence, one that does not support current narratives and which reflects a longer term problem with our road safety strategy over the last decade or more.

Other factors which we are not feeding into our road safety statistics, and which are likely to have an impact on the current trends, include the rapid increase in SUV sales in Ireland over the last decade. Cars in Ireland are now on average 300kg heavier than they were two decades ago. SUVs are two to three times more likely to kill a pedestrian than a standard size car, and are also much more likely to hit a pedestrian due to poorer visibility. This data is entirely absent from the Road Safety Authority's annual reports and consequently is absent from the Government's Road Safety Strategy.

One final piece of data that the serious injury figures tells us is that there is a direct correlation over the last 15 years between the number of cars on the road and the number of serious injuries. We saw this in the economic downturn from 2009 to 2013 and again in the pandemic lockdown in 2020. This has been acknowledged by the Road Safety Authority on several occasions and a reduction in car dependency as a means of improving road safety features as an objective in the Road Safety Strategy and is specifically referred to by Minister for Transport Eamon Ryan in his foreword, but we have yet to see it feature in any road safety campaigns.

How we measure road safety feeds directly into our Road Safety Strategy. If we are not measuring the right things, or if we are not giving sufficient weight to the things we are measuring, we are not going to have a Road Safety Strategy that fully addresses the causes of road violence. We can see this in recent campaigns by the Road Safety Authority where the focus has been on driver behaviour and there has been little or no discussion about reducing car dependency or on building safer walking and cycling infrastructure. Until we start to tackle these things in a road safety context we are not going to achieve our aim of safer roads for all.

#RoadSafety #CarDependency #ActiveTravel #SustainableTransport