A car coming the wrong way on the motorway

Most research on wrong-way driving comes from the United States and Germany. It describes two kinds of driver. One is well over the drink-drive limit. The other is older and confused, and has taken a slip road the wrong way. Neither of them knows what they are doing.

Ireland has both of those. But it also has a third kind. The Gardaí have been talking about him publicly since 2023. He turns into the oncoming traffic on purpose, because he knows what it forces the Gardaí to do.

This is not a theory and it is not new. In one week in May 2023 there were at least four of these incidents. Three of them happened within twenty-four hours. Gardaí said at the time that the drivers were copying each other.

It has kept happening since. The Garda Commissioner, Justin Kelly, says some of it is now done for an audience. He described it as being done “for social media likes regardless of the potentially devastating impact”. Gardaí, he said, are “put in a really challenging situation dealing with such incidents.”

Two things follow from this, and they shape the rest of the page.

First, this driver does not behave like the one in the research. He is not confused. He is not going to realise his mistake. He is not going to slow down. He may be going much faster than the traffic around him. He may weave between cars, overtake, or drive along the hard shoulder. Where he will be on the road is much harder to predict. I say so again later, in the part where it matters.

Second, and this is the more useful one. When the Garda car gives up the chase, nobody official knows where that car is any more. Ireland has no cameras watching for this. It has no warning signs that light up. It has no radio system that breaks into the programme to warn the drivers ahead. For those few minutes, the only people who know where that car is are the drivers who have just met it. That makes an ordinary driver with a phone the whole early warning system. That is not a figure of speech, and it is why the phone call later on this page matters more than the steering.

The document is called Emergency Advice: Encountering a Vehicle Travelling in the Wrong Direction. It says that if a vehicle is coming towards you the wrong way on a motorway, you should:

Most of this is good advice. The second half is exactly right: get off the motorway, then ring, then tell them where the car is and what it looks like. That is the part of this page that matters most.

The document also asks drivers to look far ahead and to expect the unexpected. And it has one line that is more useful than all the rest:

That is how it usually starts, in every country. It is the most useful sentence the RSA has written about this. It is on page one of a document nobody was told about.

But two things are missing, and one thing has been repeated wrongly.

Missing: which way to move

“Create as much space” does not tell you where to go. Left or right? For a driver who cannot see yet where the other car is — which is most drivers, most of the time — the RSA says nothing. Neither do the Gardaí.

Repeated wrongly: “move to lane two or three”

A reporter asked the RSA what “create space” meant. An RSA spokesperson replied:

Look at the first part of that sentence. It is about one situation only: a car you can already see, and it is on the hard shoulder. That is a real situation and the advice is right for it.

The problem is what happens next. When a line like that gets repeated, the first part falls off and only “move to lane two or three” is left. As a general rule that sends you towards the lane where a wrong-way car is most likely to be. The rest of this page explains why.

Two cars, each doing 120 km/h, come together at 240 km/h. That is about 67 metres every second.

On a clear night with a good view of the road, you might first pick out a wrong-way car somewhere between 150 and 200 metres away. That gives you about two and a half to three seconds.

Now take away the time it takes to react. Reacting to something you did not expect takes around a second and a half before your hands or feet do anything at all.

Why you see it so late

You can see headlights a kilometre away. What you cannot see, until much later, is that they are coming at you instead of past you on the other side of the barrier.

Your eyes judge that something is approaching by how fast it grows. At these speeds it stays small for a long time and then grows very suddenly. By the time it looks like it is coming at you, it nearly is.

Why the reaction is so slow

Researchers separate two things. One is startle: the jump you get from a bang or a flash. The other is surprise: seeing something that does not match what you expected.

A wrong-way car makes no noise and gives no flash. It is pure surprise. Surprise is slower than startle, because the delay is spent working out what you are looking at.

That is the one thing a page like this can change. You cannot train away startle. But you can make the situation less surprising by having thought about it once already, sitting in a chair, with nothing at stake. That is not a skill and it is not a course. It is a decision made in advance, so that your first second and a half is not spent working out what you are seeing. It may not be enough. It is what there is.

There are two answers here. They are not equally strong, so take them in order.

If the driver is confused or drunk, we know where he will be

A driver who is going the wrong way by mistake still feels that he belongs on one side of the road. He keeps to the side that feels like his left, because that is where he drives every day.

But he is facing you. So his left is not your left. His left is the other side of the road. On an Irish motorway that puts him next to the central barrier — which, from your seat, is the lane on your right. It is the lane you overtake in.

That is not a guess. Four separate sources say the same thing.

The Rules of the Road names the lanes for us. Lane 1 is the lane beside the hard shoulder. The lane beside the central barrier is lane 2 on a two-lane motorway, or lane 3 on a three-lane one.

If the driver is running from the Gardaí, we do not

So the strongest reason to sit in lane 1 is not the one about where he probably is. It is this one:

So the rule stays the same, but for a better reason. Drive in lane 1 — the left lane — because that is where your escape route is. If the other driver also happens to be nowhere near you, that is luck. Do not build your plan on it.

One more thing about the confused driver, because it points the other way. A car that came up an exit slip road, and has not moved across yet, will be on your side of the road. That is exactly the situation the RSA spokesperson was describing, and it does happen.

Before it ever happens

The moment you see it

Every light ahead of you on your side of the road should be a red rear light. White headlights on your side are the warning. Act on the colour. Do not wait to see whether they are getting closer.

After he has passed

“Why not just stop, like the hauliers say?”

This is the best question anyone has asked me about this page, so here is the full answer.

The Irish Road Haulage Association told drivers to “move to the left and stop.” The thinking behind it is sound. In a head-on crash, what injures you is the change in your own speed. If you are stopped and he hits you at 120 km/h, your speed changes by about 60 km/h. If you are still doing 66 km/h when he hits you, it changes by about 93 km/h. Stopping really would be better.

That is the whole of it. Aiming to stop does not get you the 60 km/h. It gets you the 93 km/h and it costs you the one movement that might have made him miss you completely. And missing him completely is worth more than any of these numbers.

There are three more reasons not to be a parked car:

• The traffic behind you is still doing 120 km/h and has not seen him yet.
• The RSA itself says some of these cars are driven along the hard shoulder. That is where you would be parked.
• A stopped car cannot react to anything he does next.

Background: why braking and steering are one movement

You do not need this part to use the list above. It is here because people ask.

Most drivers only brake. When something suddenly blocks the road, nearly all drivers hit the brake first and very few steer. Against a car coming the other way, braking on its own leaves you in the same piece of road, just slower.

But braking is not wasted. A police training guide in California tells officers that at these speeds “braking would be futile”. That is true about avoiding the crash. It is not true about surviving it. The speed you have lost before you hit is the biggest single thing you control.

So you want both, together. There is only so much grip, and it is shared between slowing down and turning. That is why the instruction is “brake firmly” and not “stamp on it”, and why it is “steer left” and not “swerve”.

First, one piece of arithmetic that is repeated wrongly almost everywhere. It is the reason braking is worth doing.

So every km/h you lose still counts. You cannot brake your way out of the crash. You can change which crash it is, and the change in your own speed is what decides how it ends.

Past a certain severity the crash-test data simply runs out. Almost all real head-on crashes happen well below this one. So nobody can honestly give you a survival percentage for it. What the data does show clearly is that the risk climbs steeply with speed. That is the whole argument for staying on the pedal.

Three things are worth being true before anything happens:

People always ask whether to brace or go limp. Going limp is a story with nothing behind it. The tale about drunk drivers surviving because they are relaxed does not hold up. Bracing has been measured and it is a real trade-off: it takes the slack out of the belt, at the cost of higher loads through the legs. Nobody is going to work that out in the last half second, and you should not try. Both hands on the wheel, stay on the brake.

This is the part of the RSA's advice that deserves the most attention. It is where an ordinary driver really does change what happens next. In Ireland it matters more than in most countries.

Think back to the chase rules. When a fleeing driver turns into the oncoming traffic, the Garda car behind him has to give up. From that moment, nobody official knows where that car is.

Ireland has no cameras at motorway entrances watching for this. It has no signs that light up to warn drivers. It has no radio system that breaks into the programme. Even in Germany, which has all three, most wrong-way drives are still first reported by a member of the public with a phone.

How to tell them where you are

The RSA advice asks you to give the vehicle's location. It never tells you how. There is a system for this on every Irish motorway, and almost no driver knows it exists.

Along the left-hand verge of motorways and dual carriageways there are small signs called Location Reference Indicators. On motorways they are blue, and there is one every 500 metres. Each sign has three lines:

• the road number you are on, for example M9
• one letter for your direction: N, S, E or W
• how many kilometres you are from the start of that road

The same information is painted in the hard shoulder every 100 metres. Reading one of those numbers to the operator turns “somewhere on the M9” into an exact point on the map.

There is an obvious sales pitch available at this point, and the evidence does not support it.

Hazard-perception training does better. Scores on it do predict who crashes, training does improve them, and there is reasonable evidence it changes everyday driving. But there is no evidence that any of it helps in a three-second head-on. It would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.

What is left is real, but it is small and it is not exciting. Nearly all of your exposure to this is decided before anything happens: which lane you are in, how much space you left, how far ahead you were looking, and whether you had ever thought about it before. None of those is a skill you buy. They are decisions, and you can make them sitting in a chair.

One habit that costs nothing: look far down the road, past the car in front, instead of at the tarmac. That is what buys you the extra second. Not the headlights, and not the training.

The RSA produced a document in four days under real pressure, and it is not a bad document. It is short, it is right about the reporting, and the line about slip roads is genuinely useful. Putting it quietly at the bottom of a page with no announcement is a strange way to treat safety advice that people were asking for. But the advice itself is sound as far as it goes.

Four gaps are left. None of them is hard to fill.

• No advice on which way to move. The only positional advice so far covers a car you can already see on the hard shoulder, and that condition keeps falling off when the line is repeated. For the case where you cannot see him yet, there is nothing — and that is the case the international evidence is clearest about.
• No mention of the location signs. The advice asks you to give the car's location and never tells you that Ireland has signs and road markings built for exactly that, or how to read them.
• Nothing about warning other drivers. Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, France and the United States all say something, one way or the other. Ireland publishes nothing on it, which leaves drivers guessing.
• No detection at the entrances. Austria has hundreds of warning signs at motorway entrances, with sensors that raise the alarm the moment a car moves the wrong way. In the United States, ramp systems that light up a WRONG WAY sign turn most wrong-way drivers around before they ever reach the main road. Ireland has none of this. TII recorded thirteen wrong-way incidents on the M50 alone in 2023, and every one was spotted by a person.

The RSA says the guidance will be shared through its public information channels and that its education teams have been briefed. That is the right commitment. It is worth somebody checking in a month whether it happened.

Everything above is about somebody else's car. This last part is about yours.

Almost nobody who ends up driving against the traffic meant to do it. They took a slip road in the dark. They followed a satnav instruction that made no sense. They got confused at a junction they did not know.

If it happens, the dangerous moment is not the mistake. It is the next thirty seconds, and it is the very natural urge to undo the mistake. Do not try to undo it.

This is the advice that has been in the Rules of the Road since 2024, and the RSA repeated it in the new document. It is the same in every country that publishes anything:

If you cannot get out of the car safely, stay in it. Keep everyone's seatbelts on and put your hazard lights on.

And the line that matters most: do not try to fix it by turning round, reversing, or carrying on against the traffic.

Being in a serious crash, or close to one, does not end when the road reopens. A good number of people involved in a road crash go on to develop post-traumatic stress. Finding it hard to drive afterwards is normal. It is not weakness, and it usually settles.

Two things are worth knowing. First, sitting everyone down to talk it all through in the first few days does not help, and it may do harm. The UK health guidelines advise against it. Second, the sensible point to get help is about four weeks. If flashbacks, nightmares, avoiding the car, or feeling constantly on edge are still there after a month, see your GP and say plainly that it followed a crash.