MOTORING WITH BRIAN MCDAID: Is Donegal worse than the stats suggest? I was just reading an article as we were finishing off or motoring column this week, which sets Donegal with Cork following as the worst when it comes to road safety.
I know that a lot of work has being done to highlight road safety with working groups and emergency services.
I have attended car crashes as a member of the emergency services over the years and know that high speed collisions are still going to be the highest single factor ending in death on our roads in Donegal.
I know that our facts are based on fatal accidents and now mobile speed cameras are place in these zones along our roads.
I can only imagine that a weekly report in each speed camera van is filled out, and
points accumulated by motorists on these stretches of road will make up the next set of stats.
I would love to think that the speed van would also record the speed of every car that passes by it and also could give a percentage of the cars that were driving with in the law.
Maybe this way we would know what the majority of cars are travelling at and could possibly give a rating on the safety on that stretch of road and if it was improved or not.
On the Bank Holiday Monday I headed down to Galway for the day. It was just one of them summer days that you just love to be out on the open road.
A fill of diesel, some coffee and wipe the dust of the sunglasses and we were away.
An early start and the roads did not seem that busy, road works that had stopped for the bank holiday weekend had still the traffic restrictions and lights in place along the road.
We were making good headway and got tuned into one of the national radio stations.
The message of how many accidents happen on these bank holidays was pumped out at prime times before and after the news all day.
On the way up I don’t think I noticed one mobile speed camera on the way through Donegal from Letterkenny to Bundoran.
I was putting this down to our early start on the road. As I got into Co. Leitrim I spotted the first camera.
And As I headed on through Sligo, Mayo and through to Galway I think I seen at least two in each of these counties.
We spent a couple of hours in Galway before heading back home to Co. Donegal. Its now about two in the afternoon of a lovely sunny bank holiday Monday and as we make our way home we can’t help but notice how little traffic is on the road.
A couple of Feda O’Donnell’s busses the odd express and the odd group of camper vans travelling together.
I think I noticed more speed cameras on the way home.
I once loved to drive to Galway but find it very depressing going through small towns
with everything closed down.
There is one town or small village which I forget the name of and if you drove through it on any day of the week at 2pm you will find that there is not one business opened in it.
About twenty miles on the Galway side of Sligo the volume of traffic started to increase. I seen a speed camera van sitting at a road work section where traffic lights were in operation.
And I thought. Its a accident location and has to be covered even if the cars passing will be crawling or even stopped. On this side of Sligo the traffic had increased by a noticeable rate.
The majority of the traffic is travelling at or below the speed limit, and from Sligo to Letterkenny 90% of the road speed limit is 100kph.
So every so often this safe driving by the majority of the motorist is disrubted by motorist that firstly want to drive on your bumper, want you to drive on the hard shoulder so they can get past, and finally overtake and cut you up in the survival space that you have left between you and the car in front of you.
How do mobile speed cameras record these three offences.? What effect does this have on someone with a family in their car.
This is only the tip of the iceberg. It might seem over the top to be writing about this style of driving.
But this will never be recorded by camera vans parked along the road side. The locations that speed camera are recording speed were a fatal accident have taken place.
They will never be recording traffic speed at the actual time of day when the accident happened which will be most likely between 8pm to 8am in the morning.
I think every speed camera van should have one of these night shifts included in a weeks work.
I don’t know about Cork but Donegal is just heaven for people from Northern Ireland, and the majority of northers will tell you about their summers as kids on holidays in
Donegal.
It would be very easy to park the blame with them especially on bank holiday weekends.
But it’s not the case. A couple of bad drivers from northern Ireland will be the ones that we remember. There is as many and more southern registered cars driving badly on the
roads of our county, but nothing is done about it.
A car can travel at 109 kph along a good stretch of road and can be in control and aware of the traffic around it, but will be recored as being over the speed limit by a Speed
Camera Van, And another car can travel out of control at 95 kph on
someones bumper and not break any laws in the eyes of a machine.
I think speed cameras are failing to give us a true picture of the dangers on the road, I think the Traffic-Cor had a far better assessment of the dangers on the road and the
human eye and its judgement of the driver rather than the car would
give better results.
On a final note on the way through the Gap at the bottom of Mc Grory’s bray on my way home from Galway the traffic lights were in operation, the Traffic Garda car was parked along side them and the line of traffic continued to follow through on the red light.
I was just beginning to give up all hope when I spotted the blue lights in my rear view mirror.
Running a temporary set of traffic lights might not seem like at big offence but doing infront of a Garda car on patrol sums up how little respect some drivers have for the law.
Recording the speed of a car is not enough to get a picture of our behaviour on the road.
The old system by Garda that also were able to have a look the behaviour of the driver of the car in missing from our stats now.
And I think the only way to police traffic is the use of both the speed camera and the Garda on patrol.
FUEL PRICES:
Our Fuel prices are from Donegal Town this week and are increasing like the prices for the rest of the county.
At 129.9 for petrol and 113.9 for diesel.
FIRST AMBULANCE IN DONEGAL:
While were on the road talking about the great work that emergency services do.
We are very happy to show you a picture of what we believe was they first ambulance in Co. Donegal.
We don’t know the make but think it may be a ford, and we only know the name of the
nurse who was Sally Kelly from outside Ballybofey.
When this ambulance came into service it was the only ambulance on duty in all
of the county, which is amazing considering the size of the county.
A ’99 from O Neill’s in Ballyshannon:
Some things never change thank god. On my way down from Galway on Bank Holiday Monday I made a detour of the the by pass outside Bundoran and headed into Ballyshannon a spin.
I was trying to recall old memories that I had as a boy heading to Sligo with my dad in his
truck.
One of his stops on a good day was for a cone in I Neill’s on the bridge in Ballyshannon.
It was nice to see that shop still going well and still serving class ’99s from one of them old style cone machines, great memories.
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