I think about road safety a lot from the driver's seat, usually on some two-lane mountain road wondering if that hairpin is as tight as it looks. But every once in a while a story stops me cold, and this one out of Ireland did. A former garda superintendent has warned that the recent wrong-way motorway fatalities are, in his words, "just going to escalate."

The details are grim. Drivers entering Irish motorways against the flow of traffic have contributed to recent deaths, and the retired superintendent called those tragedies inevitable. But his warning isn't really about the drivers. It's about the policing. According to The Independent's reporting, his point is that fear of prosecution and a lack of pursuit training are hampering policing, which leaves the problem to grow on its own. That's the part he thinks will escalate.

What makes wrong-way driving so uniquely terrifying is that the physics are all wrong. You're closing on oncoming traffic at a combined speed that can exceed 120 mph on a road where nobody expects to see headlights coming at them. By the time a driver registers that something is off, the math has already been done. No ditch to swerve into, no shoulder wide enough, no time. It's one of the few crash types where being a skilled, attentive driver barely helps, because the other person's mistake arrives at you at highway speed.

Whether gardai can or should pursue wrong-way drivers is a question way above my pay grade, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But a former superintendent saying his old force's hands are partly tied is worth listening to. If the people enforcing the road can't safely intervene, prevention has to happen earlier, at the ramp, before anyone points a car the wrong way down a motorway.

Since I write mostly about getting outdoors, my honest angle on this is the long drives to trailheads. We've all done the pre-dawn launch, coffee in the cupholder, GPS murmuring directions through fog. A confusing ramp under sodium lights at 4 a.m. is exactly where a tired mind makes a fatal left instead of a right. That's my own experience talking, not a study, but I've taken a wrong exit groggy-eyed more than once, mercifully in the harmless direction. If you're doing an alpine start, build in five minutes at any interchange that feels off. Pull over. Check the signs. Nobody's summit time is worth that gamble.

If you drive motorways regularly, the practical takeaway is mostly about attention. Stay alert at night, watch distant headlights for behavior that doesn't match the road, and trust your gut when a pair of lights looks wrong. If you see one coming at you, slow down, move over and get as far from that lane as you can. I can't cite you a study for that advice, but it's the advice I'd give my own family, so I'll give it to you too.

Drive carefully out there. The trail will wait an extra five minutes, I promise.