WITH eight deaths in the M1 crash being reported as the worst motorway crash in 25 years, it’s surely time for road deaths to be seen as totally senseless and totally avoidable.

The concept, Vision Zero, is a multi-national road traffic safety project that aims to achieve a highway system with no fatalities or serious injuries involving road traffic.

It started in Sweden, it was approved by their parliament in October 1997.

A core principle of the vision is that ‘Life and health can never be exchanged for other benefits within the society’.

The first UK person to be killed by a motor vehicle was pedestrian Bridget Driscoll in 1896, to which the coroner said he hoped ‘such a thing would never happen again’.

Given that the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents estimate that 560,000 people have since been killed on UK roads, it surely begs questions as to why we still have road death.

With the 20th century giving us unbelievable discoveries and technology, eg DNA and the Large Hadron Collider, (‘it’s smashed so many atoms together it’s opened a portal to the afterlife’), one question has to be: Why aren’t speed limiters being used to control speed; air pollution and CO2 emissions?

If just one person had been killed in the Grenfell Tower tragedy, it would have been one too many.

Last year, motor vehicles killed more than 100 cyclists and as many pedestrians, (the youngest twoyears- old), and left thousands of people – the bereaved, witnesses, the police and NHS staff – severely traumatised.

We use every technological aid to fight cancer, fires and wars.

Accordingly, we should use every technological aid to protect us from motor vehicles.

Allan Ramsay Address supplied