Ben Lowry: The long-term plunge in NI road deaths is cause for celebration yet we are too shy to do so
Old folk, middle aged people, teenagers, young children, all laughing, clapping and enjoying a show, and filling the auditorium with happiness and noise.
Then imagine that they are all people who are celebrating being alive, people who in other circumstances would be dead.
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Hide AdRoughly that number of lives – a figure in the high hundreds – are saved each year on Northern Ireland’s roads today compared to 40 or 50 years ago.
That is my rough estimate of the stunning progress that has been made in road safety since the 1970s.
I work it out in the following way.
The most dangerous year ever recorded in Northern Ireland was 1972, when 372 people died. Last year, only 63 people died – the fifth safest year on record.
But the drop in fatalities is much more impressive even than that fall of 309 deaths suggests.
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Hide AdRoad traffic has soared since 1972. The number of deaths ought to have soared too.
In 1972 there were 304,000 licensed cars in Northern Ireland. Last year there were 900,000+.
The number of cars on the roads has trebled and the number of miles driven by motorists has risen by a similar magnitude.
But let’s be conservative and say that traffic levels have risen by a multiple of 2.5 since 1972.
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Hide AdIf deaths had continued at that rate, 930 would have been killed on the roads instead of 63.
A staggering 870 or so people are alive this January who might otherwise have died last year –almost enough people to fill the Opera House’s 1,000 seats.
It could have been you who was killed last year, but wasn’t due to improved safety, or it could have been me. We will never know.
While 1972 was a particularly bad year, in the whole 1970s an average of 315 people died each year.
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Hide AdAgain, by a conservative estimate more than 600 people would be dying on NI’s roads each years now if death rates had kept pace with that decade.
If you look at the table below you will see the gradual but relentless falls over the last 40 years.
Even in the last decade the fall is stark. In every year since records began in 1931 more than 100 people died, often over 200, yet since 2009 the total has always been below 100.
With the recent revival of cold war fears of nuclear war, it can seem as if there is no such thing as human progress.
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Hide AdBut the improvement in road safety is one of the advances in human affairs that give grounds for optimism. Another is the medical knowledge that is helping people to lead longer and healthier lives.
Replicate the fall in NI deaths globally and millions of lives could be saved on the roads.
Successes in road deaths are not a triumph that is unique to the Province. Great Britain and the Republic of Ireland also saw road deaths peak in the 1960s and 70s, before commencing a long decline.
The reasons for are many:
• Improvements in car design (better brakes, tyres, car frames)
• Improvements in road design
• More motorway/dual carriageway (the safest road types)
• Better road marking/signage
• Stricter road laws (such as compulsory seat belts)
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Hide Ad• Stricter enforcement of existing laws (such as on drink driving)
• Better driver training
• Greater road awareness (such as graphic adverts).
There has been a radical shift in our cultural attitude to road deaths. Consider the recent controversial court cases in which the public has complained about lenient jail terms for killer drivers.
Fifty years ago many such cases would not even have been prosecuted, let alone got prison sentences.
I think some of the graphic road deaths commercials on TV are so lacking in subtlety as to be almost embarrassing (including the recent one in which a cool, knowing young woman talks down towards boy racers as if she has a mother’s understanding of their immaturity).
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Hide AdBut as a general principle, explicit TV ads have a role to play in explaining to young drivers that they might actually die, something a teenager never really believes.
Akin with many men, I drove far, far faster in my teens than I do now.
Each year when road death statistics show another relatively safe year on our roads, officials who work in traffic safety trot out the true but ultimately inadequate line: ‘one death on the roads is too many’.
They say this because they do not want to sound insensitive to the recently bereaved. But it means that they are not emphasising the remarkable successes that have been made over the decades.
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Hide AdWe can learn so much from those successes to help us to continue to drive down deaths.
The progress on our roads is also a reminder that regulation, against which we often rail, is often there for good reason.
Some spheres of law and business are over regulated. But in other areas tight regulation has saved life.
In road safety, strict regulation of driving, of car design and of road design has been behind the dramatic drop in fatalities.
And people we love might be alive because of it.
Ben Lowry (@BenLowry2 is News Letter deputy editor
• Annual road deaths in NI since 1931
1931 114
1932 119
1933 141
1934 132
1935 123
1936 127
1937 130
1938 118
1939 147
1940 181
1941 275
1942 233
1943 155
1944 154
1945 124
1946 115
1947 112
1948 127
1949 147
1950 144
1951 167
1952 133
1953 163
1954 159
1955 160
1956 144
1957 169
1958 141
1959 156
1960 172
1961 169
1962 156
1963 176
1964 219
1965 191
1966 248
1967 217
1968 216
1969 257
1970 272
1971 304
1972 372
1973 335
1974 316
1975 313
1976 300
1977 355
1978 288
1979 293
1980 229
1981 223
1982 216
1983 173
1984 189
1985 177
1986 236
1987 214
1988 178
1989 181
1990 185
1991 185
1992 150
1993 143
1994 157
1995 144
1996 142
1997 144
1998 160
1999 141
2000 171
2001 148
2002 150
2003 150
2004 147
2005 135
2006 126
2007 113
2008 107
2009 115
2010 55
2011 59
2012 48
2013 57
2014 79
2015 74
2016 68
2017 63