About RoadSafe Ireland

A place to record two kinds of road-safety observation: problems with a road, and driving people saw. Both are written by members of the public, and both are read by a person before anything is published.

Two systems, deliberately different

Road issues are about infrastructure — a junction you cannot see out of, a missing sign, a surface that throws bikes. They are tied to a location rather than to a person, they are public, and search engines are welcome to index them. That is the point: a county council is more likely to act on something the public can find and read than on a private complaint.

Vehicle reports are about driving somebody did, tied to a registration. That is information about a person, and it is treated as such throughout: those pages require an account to read, are never indexed by search engines, are absent from the sitemap, show a masked plate rather than a full one, and stop being shown twenty-four months after publication. The registration itself is never stored as text anywhere in this system.

The difference is not caution about one and confidence about the other. It is that a pothole cannot be defamed and a driver can.

How a report becomes a page

1. Somebody submits it. An account and a confirmed email address are needed for that, which is what keeps a throwaway address from becoming a hundred reports.
2. It is screened automatically for phone numbers, addresses, registrations and abusive language. This step can send a report back to be edited. It cannot publish one and it cannot reject one.
3. A moderator reads it and decides. Nothing on this site is published without that, and nothing is refused without it either.
4. If the decision goes against the report, the reporter is told why, in writing, and can ask for the decision to be looked at again.

What this is not

• It is not a Garda service, and nothing submitted here is passed to An Garda Síochána, the RSA or a local authority. If something needs reporting to the Gardaí, report it to the Gardaí.
• It does not determine who was at fault. A report is one person’s account of something they saw, published as that and nothing more. It has not been verified against any official record, because there is no official record to check it against.
• There is no driver score. No rating, no ranking, no “worst drivers” list, and no plan for one. A count of reports is a count of reports; turning it into a judgement about a person is exactly the step this platform will not take.
• It does not identify drivers. Reports describe a vehicle and how it was driven. Who was behind the wheel is not something a witness knows, and it is not something we ask for or accept.

Where the numbers stop

The map shows road issue reports and driving reports side by side, county by county, and stops there. It does not combine them, and it does not divide one by the other. Two things being reported in the same place is not evidence that one caused the other — the roads with the most driving reports are also the roads with the most driving.

Who runs it

A very small operation — small enough that the person who reads your report is the same person who answers your email about it. That is worth knowing for two reasons: replies are not instant, and there is no support department to escalate past.

Get in touch at the content report form. If something published here is wrong about you, there are two faster routes: this is not my vehicle when a registration has been misread, and report content for anything else.

The rules

The community guidelines are what a report has to satisfy to be published, and are the most useful page here if you are about to write one. The terms cover the account and the service, and the privacy notice covers what is held about you, for how long, and how to get it back or have it deleted.