Road safety is one of the defining issues of the last decade. Ireland has made huge progress and now has one of the best road safety records in the EU. Countless lives have been saved through widespread changes in driver behaviour, better engineering and enhanced enforcement. Ireland has gone from being one of the worst EU countries for road safety, to one of the safest. However, there is still a long way to go. 162 lives were lost on the roads last year, each one of them a tragedy. This new Road Safety Strategy is called ‘Closing the Gap’ because Ireland wants to match the safety records of the UK, Netherlands and Sweden. The last Road Safety Strategy showed what can be achieved when national Government and local authorities work together with the Road Safety Authority, Gardaí, NRA and many others to improve education, engineering and enforcement. This new Strategy sets out to make our roads safer, but there will also be a renewed focus on reducing the severity of injuries for those who survive a serious collision and reducing serious injuries overall. (Author/publisher)
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