Automobile Safety - Slaughter on the Highways Essay -- Argumentative P

Slaughter on the Highways If there is one thing that is largely ignored in our society, it is the sheer slaughter that takes place daily on our roads and motorways/highways. It just doesn't get the same media and political attention as crime and drugs do, even though the number of road deaths is far greater than in both of these categories. When politicans want to raise their popularity they nearly always talk about the high number of deaths from drugs and the like, and what measures they are going to introduce to bring these down. You rarely hear anything about major campagins to reduce road deaths. There is no votes in road safety ! Why ? - Because it just does not get the proper attention it deserves. If you piled up the bodies from just one year of road accidents, it would be called a massacre. If you look at the statistics and compare them with all other categories, in practically every western nation, road deaths are the single biggest killer of young people and then it is followed by other things like violent crime and drugs. The levels of the latter two are quite variable from country to country, but they are still always lower than road deaths. As an example, we will examine the statistics for Ireland, which would be reasonably average in that it lies in the middle of the best and worst of western nations. In Ireland which has a population of about 3.5 million people, around about 400 people are killed on the roads every year. This means over the course of just one year you have a 3,500,000/400 = 1 in 8750 chance of being killed. These odds are very high. If you thought you had these chances of winning the lotto, you would be delighted. The thing is, we are all in the road death lotto every day and we are f... ...in society. We simply should not accept things as they are. Why not aim for targets approaching zero or are you willing to say when your husband/wife or young daughter or son is killed that - Ah well these are the risks we take for the convenience of the motorcar. It's at that point you will be wishing that all individuals in society had not been willing to take the risks and had acted to reduce them and prevent your personel tragedy. After all, don't we all act to reduce other risks, such as house fire insurance, which is a much lower risk ? These targets can be reached and there are almost limitless minor technical tricks that can be employed to help bring about that situation. In fact maybe someone could make a start on the web site mentioned above and someone else produce the data for the booklet, (above also). The rest after that is largely politics !