Letter: Road users are indeed responsible for crashes but some NI roads could benefit from redesigning certain aspects to improve their usability and safety
A letter from Martyn Boyd:
J Hamill writes in a letter (Let's be honest, roads aren't responsible for claiming lives – speed and careless motoring by drivers are fully to blame, October 14) that there is no such thing as a dangerous road, that it is drivers and riders who are solely to blame for all collisions.
In broad terms, what J Hamill asserts is true: that on any given road, thousands of other drivers and riders have negotiated it without incident and that excessive speed, and in particular careless driving, are leading factors in road collisions. I agree with J Hamill in those broad terms. No road was ever deliberately designed to be dangerous.
In my locality, Portaferry Road in Newtownards is often cited as a ‘dangerous road’. Figures from the Department for Infrastructure indicate that this road has, on average, 11,000 vehicle movements per day.
Between January 2016 and December 2020, PSNI figures show there were 111 collisions on that road with 178 casualties, three of which were fatal. The greatest number of casualties were car drivers and passengers, totalling 159.
Given the total number of vehicles using that road, this is an almost irrelevant number of incidents, except that each represents someone killed or injured and a family traumatised.
Taken as an average of more than 20 collisions per year between 2016 and 2020, it is stark and indicates that something needs to be addressed.
But the road is not inherently dangerous, as millions of other vehicles travelled it without incident in that period. It is road user behaviour that must be tackled with more urgency than redesigning roads, and reducing speed limits to treat the problem is only to ignore the root cause and shy away from taking proper, robust action.
We, humans, road users of all types, are responsible.
Where I disagree with J Hamill is in the fact that some roads could benefit from redesigning certain aspects to improve their usability and, therefore, safety. And several others have become inherently hazardous in stretches due to decades of inadequate maintenance, making them, in effect, dangerous to use, especially for motorcyclists, a road user group not listed by J Hamill, despite that we equal the number of HGVs on our roads.
To illustrate how an otherwise safe road becomes hazardous, 39 motorcyclist collisions occurred in NI between 2015 and 2019, caused by potholes and other road defects, and some of those collisions were very serious.
This is why Motorcycle Action Group UK has been campaigning to have motorcyclists' safety taken into account as part of road maintenance thinking, because many defects that cause no trouble to cars, vans, lorries, buses, etc, can still pose serious hazards to motorcyclists, yet only defects that pose hazards to cars, etc, seem to be repaired.
Infrastructure minister Liz Kimmins, in a recent meeting we had with her, was receptive to this situation and seemed to give assurances that road maintenance would be improved to take account of our safety needs. Our philosophy is very simple in this matter: if it is safe for a motorbike, it is safe for all.
Martyn Boyd, Northern Ireland representative, Motorcycle Action Group UK