"People are making arrangements for alternative transport," Superintendent John Farrelly of the Garda Press Office was quoted as saying the other day in the course of a report on the calamitous road accident figures. "It is not the culture now to be associated with drink-driving . . ."
Perhaps it is not the culture; but it is certainly the culture to be associated with drink-walking, drink-cycling, drink-hitching, and drink-standing still in a queue till daybreak because of the scarcity of taxis and public transport. The only truly surprising thing about this last Christmas season is that the mob did not storm Government buildings and publicly execute all the officials responsible for the utter mess on our roads, of which the quite inexcusable death-toll is merely one symptom. That day will come, as surely as the ancien regime fell; and those who think that the Bastille is what you take when you have tonsillitis will soon get very sore throats indeed. If, in their collective wisdom, the plain people of Ireland decide to take the fools responsible for this state of affairs and slowly throttle the lives out of them, I will be more than happy to hold their coats for them.
Queueing for taxis
There were thousands of people milling through the centre of Dublin at about 3 a.m. on New Year's Day, and forming queues hundreds long for taxis. And of course there were none. There was no form of transport to take these people home. The Government has capitulated to the taxi-drivers' lobby, and sees its primary duty as protecting the monopoly enjoyed by the owners of taxi-plates - who for the most part are not even taxi drivers. Meanwhile, the Government's other arm, bus-operating, has been given a mirror-image monopoly, which it declines to modernise, improve, or even operate at all when it is necessary.
Perhaps what we really need is for half-a-dozen teenage girls hitching home because of the absence of transport to be raped and murdered. No doubt many of you would think that a high price to pay, and it is, especially since it is unlikely we will get many volunteers for the necessary sacrifice, and our victims will, if you like, be conscripts. A terrible shame and all that: but what lesser fate will induce the Government to provide bus services and permit the creation of a taxi-service which relates to actual need?
It is not coincidental that we cheerfully watch the massacre of nearly 500 people on our roads, even as we have a Government policy which effectively obliges unaccompanied women to hitch-hike home after a night out. Getting these things right is enormously difficult. It requires good minds, working to realistic and achievable objectives, to manage roads and transport in a complex society such as ours. There is a unity to such things; and failure in one area will generally be accompanied by failure in others.
There are many examples of how we get traffic-management wrong, beginning with how people are given driving licences in the first place. There are many people in Ireland who are not fit to be behind the wheel of a wheel-barrow, never mind that of a powerful modern motor car.
Traffic policy
One can sense the level of the mighty intellects at work in the creation of traffic policy in the manual for learner-drivers, which, among other jewels, contains the priceless nugget that it is permissible to overtake a car on the left when traffic in the outer lane is moving more slowly than on the inside lane. I see. So it is not permissible to overtake on the inside when cars in the outer lane are going faster than you. Not permissible; and, I might add, not possible.
With this sort of gibberish going into driver education, is it surprising that we have unleashed onto our few score miles of motorway untrained fools who think that the outer lane is for cruising at 30 mph? Is it surprising that there are absolutely no public service advertisements telling people how to drive on motorways? Is it surprising that . . ? No, no, I cannot go on. Attend to this carefully. It is official Department of Environment policy to have two systems of measurement on our roads. Distances are measured in kilometres, speeds in miles. All new distance signposts are in kilometres, all new speed signs in miles an hour. According to a Department spokesman, speeds are in miles per hour "because it would be too expensive to change the signs to metric, and we couldn't have two speed measurement systems."
Too expensive, eh? But in the same breadth he admitted that sooner or later under European law we were going to have to go metric anyway. Meanwhile, we are still erecting imperial signposts which will be redundant within Euro-law, which will have to be replaced sooner or later, and which only confuse our own motorists, never mind the baffled foreigners who enter Ireland without ever being told we employ two systems of measurement on our roads.
Common sense
But that barely matters. There is no Government ethic which demands that public money is spent wisely or well. Common sense tells us there is absolutely no reason why motorways should not be completely metric from the outset. But then there is no reason why motorways should not be planned from the moment of conception for entrance by sliproads - no reason, that is, apart other than the cretinous decision-making which will ensure that Ireland will soon contain Europe's largest breeding population of roundabouts.
Roundabouts are three things: Cheap, inefficient and dangerous. They seem to offer a solution to the problem of intersecting traffic, but by mingling that traffic, they slow it down and increase collision opportunities. And roundabouts necessarily limit your vision of what lies in your path. Cars travelling down a dual carriageway enter roundabouts too quickly to stop when the drivers discover the lane ahead is blocked. We have a catastrophe in the making; and who cares?