AFTER the horrendous death of a toddler on Sunday, it seems inappropriate to talk about successes in road safety.
But something stunning has been happening on our roads, with dramatic numbers of lives being saved.
There never seems an appropriate time to celebrate the success because there is still an average of one death a week, and there is always a family in mourning.
Yet it is important that we do discuss, and learn from what we are doing right, to save other families from bereavement.
If 1972 levels of road traffic deaths (there were 372 deaths that year) had been maintained last year, with the much higher modern traffic levels, perhaps 900 people would have been killed in Northern Ireland last year.
That means that around 850 people are alive in the Province who would have been killed last year at 1972 levels – enough to fill the Grand Opera House.
Or consider even the improvement in the last decade.
In the five years 2000 to 2004 inclusive, 766 people died on the roads of Northern Ireland. Over the last five years, when traffic levels were similar to a decade ago, that total plunged to 384.
Safety improvements since 2000, let alone earlier, mean that hundreds of people are alive in Northern Ireland who would otherwise be dead, and thousands of people have been spared serious injuries.
This is not, as might be assumed, much to do with the recession. Traffic levels are down only fractionally, and cannot explain the scale of the improvement.
As Andrew Howard says above, greater speed enforcement and awareness is an important factor, an uncomfortable truth for anti-speed camera campaigners.
Road deaths per mile travelled have been falling relentlessly since car ownership soared in the 1920s, due to several main factors:
l Better engineered cars (air bags, brakes and crash resistant materials);
l Better engineered roads (motorways and dual carriageways are much safer than single carriageways);
l Clearer road markings;
l Seat belt laws (the biggest single improvement since cars began);
l Greater enforcement and awareness of risky behaviour such as drink driving and speeding;
l Better driver training.