Stall The Ball

Councillor Damien Blake has posted a blog raising the issue of road deaths in Ireland. He makes some interesting points and one in particular.

Have a look at roaddeaths.ie map.

Really look at it. That map represents all the deaths on Irish roads since APRIL 2006

Then forward the link onto anyone you know.

EDIT: Click any of the tombstones to get details of that fatality.

EDIT 2:

Having a bit of a think about this I wondered what the correlation between numbers of cars versus deaths was over the last few years.

From my own look at the Garda statistics I generated the following graph.

What was going on in the 70s is anybody’s guess.

But what intrigued me was how this related to car numbers on the road. It seems I wasn’t the only one; the Society of Actuaries in Ireland had a piece on this written by Declan Lavelle In their October 2006 newsletter.

The following graph shows the number of deaths versus population and cars on the road.

Big difference I think you will agree. But just in case you thought it was all hype and media waffle, the final comment of Declan Lavelle referring to the fact that the UK safety record is much better than ours. “Finally, it is sobering to reflect that if we had been able to match the UK’s safety record, we could have saved almost one life for every two days since May 2003.“