Musings

Every bank holiday weekend in Spain, the Spanish media focus on the number of deaths in traffic accidents. Good job; in other countries this hidden holocaust tends to pass unnoticed unless there are large numbers of casualties in a single accident. This past weekend was a long bank holiday weekend (Saturday to Wednesday), and the signs above the road when we were driving on the motorway last Friday pointed out that there were 77 deaths last year on the same weekend. The final death toll this weekend was 55, a big improvement but still a frightening number. The last fatal car accident, in the early hours of Thursday morning, was the particular focus of attention on the news - a driver drove 10 km on the wrong side of the motorway, continuing despite many near misses, eventually colliding head-on with a car that had just pulled out to overtake a lorry and was therefore totally unaware of the approaching danger. The car contained a family of four, two young children in the back. The parents were killed (as was the driver of the other car), but the lorry driver managed to use his fire extinguisher to douse the flames sufficiently to be able to pull the kids out, badly burned but alive.

My first thought when I was watching these reports was, yes this is tragic, but what about the 52 other deaths, the hundreds of other injuries, the dozens of people who will have lost limbs or become paralysed, the hundreds of families affected by death, serious injury, trauma. Then I realised that unless you personalise it and zoom in on one event, person, family, it all remains simply another bunch of statistics, accompanied by film of firemen cutting open another car wreck.

Spain has a long way to go in reducing its death toll on the roads, but it's getting there. Totting up casualty figures on bank holiday weekends is an effective way of keeping the subject fresh in people's minds, something they could copy in other countries.