Ireland’s Road Death Figures should not be trusted

At least, not when it comes to making policy

Readers old enough to remember the Covid Pandemic (I joke, but it does often seem as if lots of people have conveniently developed amnesia) might recall the great statistical brouhaha over “died of covid” versus “died with covid”.

In summary, what was happening was this: A person might be involved in a very serious road accident, and be admitted to hospital. Efforts would be made to save their life, but tragically they would expire. In the process – because everyone had to be tested – a covid test would be administered. If it was positive, and the person later died of their injuries, RTE would dutifully be fed statistics recording the person as having “died with covid”. Because they had covid, and they died. Why those deaths were being linked to Covid in any way at all was never made clear, even though there wasn’t any official deception at play.

And of course, in some cases, “died with” and “died of” is a distinction without much difference: Covid certainly knocked off a good number of older and sicker citizens who otherwise might have lived… a few more months, maybe? What is clear, however, is that the number of otherwise healthy people in the whole of their health who got covid and died as a direct result was vastly, vastly smaller than the total number of recorded “covid deaths”.

All of which brings me to today’s idiocy on road deaths. Here’s the Minister for Road Safety:

“The Minister of State with responsibility for road safety has defended his record as the number of deaths on Irish roads continue to rise.

“I don’t look at the record and say, ‘Is it a failure of me?’

“It’s a failure of everybody involved, including road users,” Minister of State for Transport Seán Canney said on Monday……

“As of Monday, Garda statistics show there were 138 deaths on the roads so far this year, compared to 127 for the same period last year.”

Of course, those figures include the five buckos who got themselves vapourised on the M9 over the summer, by driving the wrong way down the road. Take those deaths alone out of the figures, and you have a year-on-year increase of just six deaths, which falls well within normal statistical variance.

That, of course, does not include other incidents that may not be a full reflection of the safety of Irish roads. For example, Ireland does not – and never has, because it is very difficult – record what percentage of single vehicle accidents are in fact suicides. An Australian study carried out some years back suggested that an uncomfortable number of such accidents – especially when otherwise unexplained (sober driver collides head-on with tree, for example) are in fact tragic mental health events disguised as accidents.

There were other horrible incidents this year that do not necessarily indicate a widespread problem on the roads. When a train hits a car at a level crossing, for example, as one did some weeks ago causing the horrific death of a young child, is that a “road death” or a “railway death”? It goes down in the figures as a road death, even though (and that incident has not yet been fully investigated) common sense might suggest that an incident of that nature has a very low relationship with “road safety”.

“Now John”, you might say, “all measurements are imperfect”. And that is true – you can’t really go through every road accident or death in a car that happens and pull out a perfect narrative that explains every one, or a policy that would put an end to them.

But the point is this: These figures, which do not really provide an accurate picture of what is happening on the roads, are nevertheless used to drive policy. And that policy is relentlessly anti-driver.

The Government wants, for example, to further reduce speed limits. But anybody who actually drives regularly knows that speed limits are rarely a problem – if anything those are too low on some roads. Break out the road deaths by road type, and I strongly suspect you would find that motorways have vanishingly low fatality rates compared to the number of people who use them.

Besides, another thing anyone who drives knows is that when accidents occur due to reckless driving, the reckless driver is generally not obeying the law anyway.

If the government wants to tackle something, one problem is that the speed limit on the stretch from Dublin to Naas on the N7 is the exact same as the speed limit on large stretches of the N71 road from Killarney into the national park – 100kph – despite one of those roads being straight and safe, and the other being one of the most dangerous narrow roads in the country. This pattern is repeated all over the country: Where speed limits are too high for the road type, and in other cases, where they are too low.

But the “road death” figures are one of those things that the media treats as unimpeachable evidence that things are going wrong on the roads, and that drivers must be further regulated. Government does the same.

It’s cheap, and it won’t solve the problem, where there is one. Making people drive more slowly on the M9 will not make the roads in Donegal safer, nor would it change the peculiar “young bucko with a motor” culture that seems to afflict that part of the country in particular.

But that level of discussion and reasonableness appears beyond Irish politics. Or the media that covers it.