Twenty people lost their lives on Portuguese roads during the ‘Easter holiday period’ – in one case, an entire family was killed. The shameful balance of police forces’ ‘Operation Easter’ this year shows that messages and exhortations for people to ‘drive safely’/ ‘drive defensively’ just do not get through.
Making matters somehow worse was the fact that the prime minister published a ‘promotional video’ during the holiday from the back seat of his official car, in motion, in which he was not wearing a seatbelt.
The video panned to the PM’s driver, engaged in jocular conversation with the head of government, and he too appeared not to be wearing a seatbelt.
The prime minister’s office has since confirmed that the PM was without the seatbelt required by law, but claimed the driver was wearing his ‘under his jacket’. The fact that this would require gymnastics to perform (and why?) has not been questioned.
But the reality that this blatant video was filmed during one of the most tragic Easter’s on record underscores the problems police are up against: people do not appear to be listening to road safety advice.
Talking on RTP news on Tuesday, PSP superintendent Sérgio Soares stressed that almost every negative was ‘up’ this year: there were more deaths, more seriously injured, more people drink-driving (a 24% increase), and more accidents. The only positive was that there were fewer incidents of people caught speeding.
Combining figures from the GNR and PSP, this year saw 53 people seriously injured in roughly 2,300 accidents.
One of these was the Portuguese driver, late 60s, who appears to have pulled out of his land on the IC1, colliding with a rental car driven by a German father who had just arrived in Portugal, for an Easter holiday with his wife and two teenage children. The entire family died in this head-on collision which, like all the other fatal accidents, is now being ‘analysed’ to try and understand what went so badly wrong, and why.
In the tragedy claiming the lives of the German family (close to Santiago de Cacém), the Portuguese driver who was on the wrong side of the road when the collision happened, was airlifted to hospital in a serious condition.
Another 52 people are also in hospital as a result of the carnage on the nation’s roads, with around 800 described as ‘lightly injured’.
The GNR and PSP Easter road safety operations checked over 40,000 drivers, finding a number of ‘infractions’: people over the alcohol limit; driving without insurance; driving without valid inspections (MOTs), without valid licences. Some (over 300) were stopped for using their mobile phones while driving (again, indication that the constant messaging against this is just not getting through); others (64) were fined for not wearing their seatbelts.
Prime minister Luís Montenegro does not appear to be facing a fine for his lack of seatbelt, which also suggests a degree of weakness by authorities when it comes to enforcing the law equally. British readers may remember a former prime minister (Rishi Sunak) caught in a similar transgression, and he had to pay his fine.
