The dangerous duplicity at the heart of our road death statistics

According to the latest figures from the Road Safety Authority, Irish roads have never been safer. In fact, they’re twice as safe as they were a decade ago, with a 30% drop in fatalities and injuries bringing them down to their lowest levels in forty years. Out of 25 EU countries, we’ve jumped up to Number 12, putting us into the top half in terms of road safety. And that’s despite a 40% increase in the number of drivers and a 70% increase in the number of vehicles on our roads. Irish roads are now safer than Italian, Spanish, even Belgian and Austrian roads.

Not bad going at all – given that we have a high rural population, some of the worst roads in Europe and a laughable driver testing/licensing system that has resulted in 400,000 untested or failed drivers careening up and down those roads.
Add to that the fact that we’re a nation of reckless, feckless binge-drinkers – or so we’re constantly being told – and our performance looks even more impressive! What’s more, the future looks even brighter, with plans for more (safer) dual carriageways and motorways, linking our towns and cities, cars that will be safer thanks to technology and a vastly improved driver testing system.
The recently published Road Safety Strategy sets ambitious targets for the coming years, designed to make us one of the best performing countries in Europe. RSA Chairman Gay Byrne stated confidently that “Ireland has the capacity to become one of the ‘best practice’ countries” – alongside Sweden, the Netherlands and the UK.
So, things are looking up then, as far as road safety is concerned? Or are they?

SPEED LIMITS A MYSTERY
Reading the newspapers, listening to the radio or watching TV in recent months, you would be forgiven for thinking things have never been as bad. The “continuing carnage on our roads” is the usual line trotted out in the media. After almost every road fatality, there is the usual hand-wringing with calls for more draconian laws, tougher enforcement, tighter restrictions, more speed cameras, more and more penalty points offences.
So what’s it all about?
Here’s one view: road deaths are tragic for all concerned but while everything within reason must be done to reduce them, they’re no more tragic than drownings, suicides, farm accidents, or sudden deaths of any kind for that matter. All involve the premature loss of a loved-one and all the grief and heartache that entails.
But for some reason road-deaths attract most of the media coverage, while other, equally tragic cases of loss of life don’t seem to warrant the same attention. So let’s indulge in a little newspaper-speak: on average a staggering 160 people die in drowning incidents every year. That’s equivalent to one every few days – but, apart from the more spectacular cases where fishing boats sink for example, they hardly make the headlines Perhaps it’s all down to the highly visible nature of car crashes and the fact that we’re all road users.
This was highlighted recently when eight people died in a particularly bad weekend at the start of this month. One crash in Co. Laois saw four people killed in a head-on collision on a dangerous stretch of the N7. The scene, with cars mangled beyond recognition and debris scattered all over the road, was grim. The local priest, Fr Jackie Robinson, who gave the last rites to the victims, pleaded with everyone to “slow down”, adding that 90% of cars travelling on that stretch of the road were exceeding the speed-limits.
He had a point. According to the World Health Organisation, speed is the leading killer on European roads. The WHO estimate that reducing the average driving speed by a mere 3 km/h would save around 5,000-6,000 lives each year and would prevent 120,000 to 140,000 crashes in the EU alone.
From the Road Safety Authority’s own figures, it’s likely that a similar effect would be achieved in Ireland. At 60 km/h, they say nine out of 10 pedestrians will be killed in an impact with a vehicle; at 50 km/h five out of 10 pedestrians will be killed and at 30 km/h one out of 10 pedestrians will be killed. Even minor reductions in speed limits, they insist, would save countless lives.
Why, then, aren’t public and politicians falling over themselves demanding that speed limits be cut dramatically? Could it be because nearly everyone speeds and that speed limits are often a compromise between safety and the (perceived) need to get from A to B as quickly as possible – even if it means lives being lost?
The proportion of pedestrian deaths has actually risen from 18% in 2003 to 24.5% in 2007. SUVs have been cited in many studies as being a growing threat to vulnerable road users. Yet the Road Safety Authority denies that SUVs are contributing to the growing pedestrian toll.
“The increase in deaths is probably more to do with vehicle speeds increasing,” says spokesman Brian Farrell. “The single biggest group to benefit from penalty points for speeding offences when introduced in November 2002 was pedestrians. More pedestrians were surviving because more cars slowed down and impact speeds were reduced. As the penalty points effect wore off, the opposite happened.”
As anyone who has driven this country’s roads will attest, speed limits are a mystery. Take a typical Irish country road with high hedges, a ditch either side, meandering through hills and valleys, with sharp bends. It’s not wide enough for, say, a large van or truck and a car to pass each other safely without slowing to a crawl. Yet astonishingly, the speed limit is likely to be 80km per hour. (“It’s not a target – it’s a limit” is the usual cry from the road safety gurus. Then why not make it lower?)
Clearly our need to get around takes precedence over safety – so we need to find someone (else) to blame for the “carnage.”
Without doubt the single most headline-grabbing, hysteria-generating subject when it comes to road safety is the question of ‘drink-driving’.
In the US, the “drink-driver” has replaced the communist as the number one hate figure – witness the public flogging of Paris, Kiefer, Mel, Lindsay and any other Hollywood celebrity who gets “done for DUI” (Driving Under the Influence). Here in Ireland, the authorities have similarly made a pretty good job of demonising the driver who has had a drink and making him – or her – a social pariah.
The permitted blood alcohol limit in Ireland is currently the same as in the UK at 0.08 (as it is in the USA, Canada and New Zealand). But that isn’t enough for the RSA. Their latest policy is to further reduce our permitted alcohol levels to the European norm which is 0.05. The new Road Safety Strategy calls for this new limit to be introduced no later than June 2009.

IGNORING THE GLOBAL
ACCIDENT RISK
But how bad is our drink-driving problem? And to what extent does alcohol really contribute to road accidents? This is where it gets very interesting.
Virtually every newspaper article or radio discussion on the drink driving issue refers to the “alcohol-related” figure of 36.5% – which is then usually bumped up to 40% for convenience’s sake (there is in fact a 10% increase involved in that piece of sophistry alone). However, the truth is that even the base figure is fundamentally a distortion. Few people, for example, are aware that this includes pedestrians who have been involved in accidents – some of whom have as low as 0.02 blood alcohol in their systems (less than half a pint of beer!) – and who are killed by sober drivers.
The only comprehensive national research on drink-driving in Ireland is the Bedford Report, which examined fatalities for 2003. It claims to examine the role of alcohol in fatal accidents – but in reality, it looks at the presence of alcohol (a very different thing). The report – which involved examining Garda files – simply seeks out the presence of any measurable amount of alcohol (legal or otherwise) in any road fatality, and registers it as an alcohol-related fatality. This is grossly misleading, when it comes to understanding the real extent to which alcohol causes road accidents or deaths.
For a start, the report – which has been very influential in shaping Irish policy in this area – doesn’t appear to take into account the fact that all drivers are at some risk of crashing whether they’ve consumed alcohol or not (and remember, most accidents are not alcohol related).
The basic idea of attributable risk is that some of the accidents involving drivers who have consumed alcohol are not due to the effects of alcohol but are the result of what is called the “global accident risk”, which is also present for sober drivers. In other words, whether a driver has had a drink or not, accidents can occur variously as a result of brake failure, heart attack, weather conditions, inattention, using a mobile phone, suicide and so on.
Statistically, to get the true picture of the number of accidents actually caused by drivers with alcohol, the figures need to be adjusted (or weighted) to allow for this global accident risk, yielding what is called an ‘excess’ number of accidents which are specifically attributable to the effects of alcohol.
In the Irish context, no one seems to be interested in establishing this figure. That is inexplicable – except in as much as we can say that it seems to suit those who have the responsibility for this area to heighten the hype about alcohol and road deaths. However, a study entitled Accidents, Alcohol and Risk carried out at the Center for Traffic Sciences, University of Wuerzburg, Germany concluded that just 10.8% of all accidents in Germany can be attributed to the effects of alcohol.
Whether a similar analysis of Irish accidents would produce the same results is impossible to tell – but, as we will show, it is more likely than not that the figure would be in this vicinity.
The German survey found that 5% of drivers tested positive for alcohol. Currently the Gardai say they are conducting 30,000 breath tests per month, arresting on average about 1,500 drivers – which again is 5% of the total. It is an unexplained anomaly, incidentally, that this figure hasn’t reduced despite the efforts of the authorities over the past few years – a detail that casts further doubt over the figures and the way they are generally presented to the Irish public. Interestingly, given that checkpoints are more likely to be set up at times when drivers have consumed alcohol, drink-drivers are likely to be over-represented at this time.
Either way, the number of drivers found to be over the limit is comparatively small, and appears roughly in line with German figures. This implies that the adjusted figure for alcohol as a contributing factor here is probably close to the German figure of 10.8%. It is certainly a lot lower than the 40% usually stated.
Preparing this article, HotPress asked the Road Safety Authority what was the true figure for drink-driver fatalities in this country. “It is accurate to say that alcohol is a contributory factor in 28.5% of driver deaths,” said RSA spokesman Brian Farrell. “It is equally accurate to say that overall, alcohol is probably a contributory factor in approximately 36.5% of fatalities – this includes both driver and pedestrian deaths.”
Let’s take that at face value and say that, for a start, figures for pedestrians with alcohol killed by sober drivers have no place in any discussion about drink-driving, random breath-testing and alcohol limits. It’s an entirely separate issue, and if we are to have an honest debate should be acknowledged as such.
Furthermore, HotPress asked, wouldn’t the true driver-alcohol figure be even lower, given that the figures produced do not take into account the global risk as outlined above? The response? “I’m afraid I don’t follow your line of thought that the ‘true figure for 2003 would be somewhat below 28.5%’. This is to simply argue against two proven scientific facts – that any amount of alcohol impairs your driving and alcohol was found to be present in 28.5% of drivers killed in 2003.”
Let’s look at an example of what is meant here. Say a reckless sober driver – there are plenty of them out there – crashes a red light and ploughs into another car, driven by a woman who just happens to have consumed a glass of wine. Both drivers are killed and there are no witnesses. The way the figures are currently compiled, these would go down as two alcohol-related fatalities or “drink-driving deaths”, to use the vernacular. From a statistical point of view, this is simply wrong and misleading.
Or say, an elderly driver has a heart attack at the wheel and his car ploughs into a group of men having a smoke outside a pub. This has nothing to do with drink-driving but under our accident reporting system these would be yet more “alcohol related” fatalities. It is frankly preposterous that this figure is then translated into “drink-driving” but that is what happens time and time again. You could view it as a deliberate attempt to mislead the Irish public.
Even in the current Road Safety Strategy, under the heading Drink Driving, the so called ‘alcohol-related’ figure – a bogus definition, as we have shown – of 37% is used rather than the more accurate (and much lower) drunk-driver fatality figure. This was also the case when the RSA launched their 2007 Christmas Drink Driving Campaign. The Minister for Transport, Noel Dempsey TD, said at the launch that “alcohol is a contributory factor in almost 40% of all road fatalities...” Yet again, we see a gross exaggeration of the “drink- driving” problem from official sources.
Going back to the Bedford Report, the figures examined were for 2003. So, isn’t it fair to assume that – given the introduction of Random Breath Testing in July 2006, tougher drink-drive sanctions last year and the massive publicity campaigns – today’s figure is likely to be considerably lower than the 2003 figure? And if so, why are old statistics still being trotted out?
Not so, says the Road Safety Authority. “There is no evidence to say one way or the other,” Brian Farrell insists. “We are currently examining the files for 2004 and 2005.”
This is all rather strange and, indeed, impossible to fathom. Random Breath Testing came into force in July 2006. It was immediately hailed as a major success, with deaths reportedly down by as much as 25% in the following 12 months. And yet we are told that alcohol as a cause of accidents remains at the same level as it did prior to that?
In addition, Random Breath Testing wasn’t introduced in isolation. At the same time, eleven more penalty points offences came into force. And there have been other initiatives – the mandatory installation of seat belts on school buses following the tragedy in Co Meath in which five school-girls died; the opening of the Dublin Port Tunnel, taking thousands of trucks off the streets of Dublin; and the beefing up of the Garda Traffic Corps. Thus it is impossible to say that the reduction in deaths was in fact due to Random Breath Testing at all. If it was down to RBT, then the question has to be asked why the fatality toll for December 2007 was 37 – seven more than 2006, and well above the average of 30 for the five years before RBT? Meanwhile, the previous March saw fatality totals reach a five-year high despite a massive enforcement campaign centred around St. Patrick’s Weekend. Is this not enough evidence to suggest that random breath testing is having relatively little effect during key periods?
Brian Farrell: “You simply cannot draw a conclusion from just one month. Our campaigns are based on an analysis of five year’s worth of crash data. That’s the minimum period in which you can identify trends.”
Five years? That’s an interesting admission in itself, which begs a question as to what the rush was to implement even tougher drink-drive laws so soon after the introduction of Random Breath Testing.

BREATH TESTS WERE FALSE
So is there any real potential benefit to be gained from reducing the blood alcohol limit to .05 as the RSA has suggested? There are conflicting views. But according to research carried out by the Canadian Traffic Injury Research Foundation in 2002, there was no compelling evidence that lowering the BAC to .05 reduced fatalities. As the report stated, “our critical review of the evaluation literature failed to provide strong, consistent and unqualified support for lowering BAC limits. At best, the results are mixed and the methodological weaknesses in the studies question the robustness and veracity of the evidence. There is little evidence that lowering the BAC limit from 80 to 50 mg/dL will, in and of itself, result in fewer alcohol related traffic deaths.”
The authorities are very good at talking about ‘Best Practice’ – which of course they want to follow. Well, Britain – where the limit is .08 and where there is no random breath testing – is the third safest country in Europe in terms of road users. This despite the fact that there is a general perception of a major problem with so called binge-drinking in the UK.
So why is the UK at Number 3, while Ireland is at Number 12? Could it be that road deaths have far more to do with bad roads and inept drivers than with anything to do with drink, and that we’d be far better off saving the money that is now wastefully spent on the whole Random Breath Testing process? Has any proper analysis been done on where accidents occur, and what that might tell us? And if so, why do the Gardai waste so much time running speed traps on relatively safe roads like the M50?
All of that said, there is no getting away from the fact that back in 2003 we had lower road deaths than 2007 with no Random Breath Testing, fewer penalty points offences, a much slimmer Garda Traffic Corps and worse roads (and you could talk away on your hand-held phone to your heart’s content!), How does the RSA explain that?
Meanwhile, Australia – the only English speaking country with the 0.05 five limit – has had its own problems with enforcing the lower limit. A report by the Ombudsman for Western Australia, following an investigation into a breath-testing scam, found that between September 2000 and March 2001, random breath-testing statistics “were systematically falsified with evidence that 93.5% of recorded random breath tests during that period were falsified.” Overall, at least 35% of Australian random breath tests were false.
There was a huge outcry at the time, yet the problem arose again as recently as last October. According to Brisbane’s Courier-Mail, police officers “routinely manipulated alcohol testers to generate fake negative readings so they can meet a quota of three million breath tests a year.” Police claimed they are too overworked to meet the quota, with one Brisbane officer who retired in 2004 saying that for more than a decade he was “faking an average of five tests for every legitimate one he performed.”
We can only hope our own law enforcement officers don’t follow Australia’s “best practice” methods.
There is every reason to believe that Gardai are coming under increasing pressure to follow the Australian example. 2007 – the first full year in which Random Breath Testing operated – coincided with the worst homicide rate in the history of the State. Yet there are calls for even more checkpoints. Gay Byrne has stated that he would be in favour of more enforcement of the existing laws over a drop in the legal limits. And in a controversial but widely supported view, the Donegal coroner Dr Madden claimed that reducing limits would make little difference to fatality rates. He told The Irish Times that during his 17 years as coroner, in the vast majority of inquests into fatal traffic crashes where alcohol was implicated, blood alcohol levels were far in excess of the legal limit of 80mg/100ml.
“In the majority of cases, the blood alcohol levels are between 150mg and 350mg,” he said. “I believe, and I think most adult people in Ireland would believe, that having one drink and driving home is not dangerous.”
The Road Safety Authority Chief Noel Brett wrote recently that the debate as to whether we should lower our limits or not was over. It is surely much more correct to suggest that it has only just begun.