Grappling!

There are some interesting views on the Monaghan crash and the future of road safety in Ireland over at http://www.sarahcarey.ie/ and also at http://www.twentymajor.blogspot.com/

The daft thing is that politicians seem to feel that the behaviour of young people is something that they can control, and then claim credit for, am i the only person in the country who is morbidly amused that the headline on friday "gardai crackdown on road users yeilding results" are invariably followed by saturdays headlines "4 dead in head on collision.

The politicians can at best provide regulation and enforcement to attempt to influence peoples behaviour and fair play to the people who came up with the irish road safety campaigns, it's brilliant and i would imagine has saved lives.

This reminds me of the zero tolerance regime which apparently reduced crime in NYC sucessfully in the late 80's, which the police and mayor claimed all the credit and political kudos for. Malcolm Gladwell in his book "Blink" makes a fairly convincing arguement that the major contributor to the fall in crime was the Roe V Wade (1972) judgement which made abortion legal and ensured that those who would have been the major perpetrators of such crime in the late 80's and early 90's were never born in the first place.

We should be looking to the ling term in our road safety strategy rather than trying to apply sensationalist bandaids everytime there is a particularly horrific tragedy. We need a cultural change, driver education would be a start, proper enforcement, like at the times when the accidents are actually happening as opposed to 7.30 in the morning would help, and proper infrastructure.

you can't control young people, the best you can hope for is to positively influence them, fear does not seem to be working as a deterrent, maybe we should try something else.