What's wrong with this road? Where do you start...
Key to marked hazards
Pictured is a typical Irish single carriageway, and it doesn't take an engineer to see why it is lethal. Roads like these are rated as 'one star' in a new report by the European Road Assessment Programme (EuroRAP) which the AA co-authored. Ireland has a lot of these roads – 95% of our fatalities happen on them. The worst of them are now being identified and treated but we have a long way to go.
Irish single carriageways are often dreadful. Badly designed and with hazards on all sides, they are all too regularly the scene of catastrophic crashes. We are all familiar with the scene. You are on a single carriageway, you have been stuck behind a truck for the last 10kms and are now part of a rolling tailback of a dozen cars. The moment there is a hint of a straight stretch, two or three cars will go for it. It is, quite literally, a recipe for disaster.
Strictly speaking, the mad over-taker is at fault for the collision. But we can’t just call it driver error and ignore the lethal road. The EuroRAP report analyses the crash data and maps where on the road network the risk is greatest. It also allows us to measure how well a road protects the driver and to do so in a way that allows clear comparisons with other countries.
We are a small and sparsely populated country. The Netherlands, for example, has four times our population in an area the size of Leinster. We have a whopping 96,000 kms of road to cater for 4.2 million people. Many of those roads have existed for centuries, going from boreens to bothars to links between towns before being tarmac-surfaced in the age of cars. Many have never been designed, and many have a profusion of farm gates, entrances, ditches, bends and dips.
We may never fix them all, but at least we can identify which ones are worst. The EuroRAP report does that. It assesses 7,600 kms of the main road network and the NRA together with their Northern Irish counterparts is committed to fixing the 350kms of routes that the analysis shows are worst.
We have made enormous progress in building roads in recent years. In 2001 there was approx 250km of motorway/dual carriageway in the Republic of Ireland. By 2006 this figure had risen to 625 km and by 2010 it will have risen to 1250km – nearly 4 times what it was at the start of the decade. This will bring the Republic of Ireland up to ‘Best Practice’ levels in other countries with 23% of the national network being motorway or dual carriageway, which is a similar figure to that in the UK.
The road pictured is not at all unique but the problems can be addressed. It's not so much a question of 'what can you do?' as a question of 'where do you start?' . Well, you begin with the data telling you which roads to target, and then you apply engineering solutions to make sure that when a driver does make a mistake it does not become punishable by death.
You can read more about the EuroRAP report by looking at our press release, click here, or you can download a pdf of the full report:
click here.
