Most road fatalities occur after midnight, says study

HelterSkelter

From http://www.unison.ie/irish_independent/stories.php3?ca=9&si=1502213&issue_id=13238

Most road fatalities occur after midnight, says study

MORE than a quarter of fatal road crashes take place between midnight and 6am, according to the latest research.

A breakdown of the fatality toll over the past ten months shows that 28pc are recorded within the six-hour period with 11pc of the total between 2am and 4am. At the same time gardai are accounting for 30pc of their arrests for drink driving over those six hours.

"It is not a coincidence that the number of motorists being nabbed by gardai for driving over the alcohol limit and the death toll are both very high during that period," a senior garda officer said last night. "These figures must be viewed in the context of the volume of traffic, which stands at only 4pc of the daily total in those six hours," he added.

The analysis is based on fatalities between January 1 and yesterday. The overall figure is 328 deaths and the most dangerous two-hour period on the roads during the day is between 6pm and 8pm when 40 lives were lost.

Another 37 died in crashes between 4pm and 6pm, while 36 were killed between 2am and 4am, and 29 between midnight and 2am. The Gardai said the analysis showed that alcohol and drugs were contributory factors in many fatal and serious collisions and they were committed to the stringent enforcement of the legislation.

One officer also admitted that despite the resources being deployed during the six hours after midnight, resulting in the high rate of arrests, the death toll during that period continued to climb. The most lethal time on the roads, as expected, is at the weekends with Saturdays and Sundays, combined, accounting for 44.9pc of the deaths.

The safest day to travel by road is Tuesday when only 5.5pc of deaths take place. The death toll on any other day reaches double percentage figures. A two-hour breakdown of the time of drink driving arrests shows that while almost 30pc are made in the early hours of the morning, the number plummets between 6am and 4pm and then starts to rise again gradually up to midnight before soaring to a height between 2am and 4am.

Based on past trends, the Gardai estimate that over 60pc of those arrested will have more than twice the legal level of alcohol, while only a small number of drivers will not have exceeded the limit.

But despite the enforcement of the law leading to increased arrests, the Gardai are concerned that the "compliance culture is not changing sufficiently quickly".

Officers said they were working with the National Safety Council with a view to increasing public awareness generally.

The research shows that there was a rise of 15pc in the number of drink driving arrests, up from 7,873 for last year to 9,050 this year.

And over the bank holiday weekend the total number of motorists detained for exceeding the limit was up a staggering 46pc from 219 last year to 320 this year.

Gardai said this rise was due to a combination of targeted deployment of resources and a higher number of drink drivers on the roads.

They appealed to parties going out for a night to designate a driver who would abstain completely from driving or else use a taxi or public transport.

Tom Brady
Security Editor

Maybe I'm missing something here but the story title says "Most road fatalities occur after midnight", yet the body text says "MORE than a quarter of fatal road crashes take place between midnight and 6am". Surely that implies the remaining three quarters of fatal road crashes occur between 6am and midnight...in other words most fatal road crashes occur BEFORE midnight. Or am I getting this all wrong?

mike65

You're right of course, most sub-eds are illiterate (and live in a cage fed on offal).

I guess the article contains nothing of great surprise. The evening commute
is dangerous (tired and angry drivers) but busy while the wee small hours are dangerous and quiet (tired and drunk drivers).

Mike.