When we read or watch a news bulletin about a road crash fatality, we all react the same way: with horror, a sense of shared grief and a sense of guilty relief that it wasn’t our loved one. And then we get on with our lives. What are sometimes referred to as “accidents” are regarded as a tragic inevitability of modern life.
But there is a new way of thinking emerging in the community of researchers that study mobility. They argue that the term “accident” should be retired, and replaced with “crash”. (The Irish Times style book suggests “crash” or “incident”, or “collision” for an impact between two moving vehicles, should be used instead of accident.)
The reason for this is that “accident” suggests a random, unpreventable act or a small mistake with tragic consequences. But it is a dangerous term because it also implies inevitability. The researchers argue that “crash” encompasses a wider range of potential causes: many fatal crashes are caused by speeding, distracted, intoxicated or careless drivers. Decades of research link death and injury to speed and infrastructure designs that make the road environment inherently less safe.
Treating road fatalities and serious injuries as accidents is part of the human impulse to invite forgiveness and acceptance during a time of awful grief. But it also protects the system from scrutiny and change.
Speeding and drug- or drunk-driving pose grave dangers to other road users, but both are illegal. So we should enforce the law and let the punishment deter the crime. Illegal mechanically propelled vehicles (often described incorrectly as e-bikes) are just that – illegal. They are different from e-bikes and should not be on our roads or streets.
We should not accept a situation where 185 lives were lost on Irish roads in 2025
The aviation industry has a highly institutionalised safety culture that treats human error as a design challenge rather than a moral failing. And that is why flying (leaving aside its negative environmental impacts) is regarded by some measures to be 100 to 200 times safer than driving, depending on how you measure it.
When it comes to road safety, on the other hand, we do not have a culture of questioning whether the road environment or enforcement regime might have played a part.
We should challenge the notion that all these deaths are somehow inevitable. We should be furious that road safety campaigns focus on high-vis clothing while our streets become increasingly dangerous for children, when rural roads are plagued with unsafe driving and dangerous walking routes. And we should be determined to address the causal factors behind every serious injury and death and fix them – by lowering speed limits, improving safety at junctions, increasing enforcement and redesigning our streets for people, not cars.
We should not accept a situation where 185 lives were lost on Irish roads in 2025. Ireland is one of just three European Union member states with a deteriorating road safety record, according to 2025 data from the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Mobility and Transport. Poland saw a drop of 42 per cent. Helsinki had zero crash fatalities in the 12 months to July 2025, thanks to the introduction of 30km/h speed limits, safer designs that narrowed streets and slowed traffic and automated speed cameras. Ireland is an outlier with a reported increase of 28 per cent over that period.
The Government and other enforcement agencies have responded anaemically to what is clearly a public-health crisis. While the legislation is in place to reduce default speed limits, the Government chose to ask local authorities to review all changes individually, which has needlessly slowed down the process of making roads safer. Enforcement requires policing; yet the numbers of gardaí in the roads policing units has dropped by nearly 40 per cent since 2009, representing a reduction of 401 specialised personnel in traffic enforcement.
We could get a significant reduction in road deaths and injuries by reducing speeds limits in urban areas. A 2026 report by the Road Safety Authority examining cyclist fatalities and serious injuries between 2021 and 2025 found that most injuries are taking place in urban areas (Dublin accounted for more than half), and nearly half of serious injuries occurred at junctions. Even temporary bollards and junction safety improvements are better than nothing at all.
But the messaging from the RSA when it launched that report was to remind all road users to “remain vigilant” and to “share the road safely” as if there was nothing else that could be done.
Sadhbh O’Neill is a climate and environmental researcher. She is a member of the board of Transport Infrastructure Ireland but is writing in a purely personal capacity