Households all over the country are already full of tiny tyrants who have banned cigarettes, and salt, and bad language, and any pleasure you might have once taken in making a fool of yourself in front of their friends. Now they're to get their way in the car as well.

Children won't stop at seat belts either. Give them one chance to boss you and they'll take over your entire driving experience. They'll be sitting there in the back, strapped into their special raised seats with their iPods and their portable DVD players, saying, "Shouldn't you have both hands on the wheel?" and, "Only a fool breaks the two-second rule."

It will be even worse for the childless. Someone once said children are like farts: you can just about stand your own. Now we're to have other people's children sitting in our cars telling us when to change down.

Before long, children will start taking over knowledge of vehicle technology, and adults will become self-mocking and helpless, as they've done with personal computers. You'll have eight-year olds going, "Do you think she might be burning a bit of oil?" If you're a parent you'll be boasting about how clever they are, these little clones of yourself. If you're not a parent you'll have to look on the internet for an ejector seat.

The worst part of all this is that these same children, when they grow up and get cars of their own, will take back everything they said before and start driving like maniacs until they turn 30 or have children themselves, whichever comes first.

In the meantime, they can't walk to school because the roads are too dangerous, so they are driven there, very often, in massive, deadly, seven-seater four-wheel drives with crumple zones and airbags and anti-lock brakes, chauffeured by adults who have paid over a year's wages to make themselves feel this invulnerable.

So much of this road-safety campaign seems to be about the RSA preaching to the converted and an avuncular Gay Byrne going, "Now now boys and girls, drive safely." Have you ever met anyone who thinks they don't drive safely?

There are headline claims of successes with penalty pointing and breath testing and speed trapping, but people are still overtaking on corners as much as they ever did. If the road-accident problem were simple, it would have been solved by now, but amid all the hype and hysteria, some helpful ideas are being omitted.

One is that it can't be just about speed. Motorways are the fastest and yet the safest roads, mainly because you can't overtake into oncoming traffic, and because people don't live on them. A safe speed on a motorway is 120kph, but the speed limit of 80kph is unsafe on many regional roads. Ask anybody who lives in the country.

If your house is in town, you can make a big fuss and get speed bumps fixed on your street to protect your family. Traffic inches past, leaving your children to throw stones or squabble or bounce on their trampolines or whatever it is they do. But, as part of the rural idyll, parents have to lock their children up. On a country road, people can legally drive past your door at 80kph, with a consequent stopping distance of around 175 feet. Worse, because nobody polices speeding on country roads, many people will drive past your door at 120kph or more.

Finding out why people behave as selfishly as this has presented an insurmountable challenge for those charged with improving road safety, but it might be helpful at least to single it out as the main problem. After Bridget Driscoll became the first person to die in a road traffic accident in 1896, the coroner was supposed to have said: "this must never happen again." Now more than a million are killed annually worldwide. And it would be naive to think that risk compensation isn't playing a big part in this.

People moderate their degree of caution in accordance with the perceived danger. So safer cars make worse drivers, in most cases. The bigger your monstrously ugly SUV, and the more copiously it is fitted out with safety equipment, the less likely you are to drive defensively. The probability that you will be injured in a car crash goes down, but the probability that you will have a crash in the first place does not. And it's bad luck for the person you mow down.

The classic study demonstrating this was done with a fleet of identical taxis in Munich in the 1990s. Half were fitted with anti-lock brakes and the other half were not. There were 747 accidents over the following three years, split equally between the ABS and non-ABS cars, as the drivers with enhanced braking just modified their behaviour, counteracting the reduced risk.

More recently . . . and somewhat less compellingly . . . research last month by the University of Bath even sugges-ted that wearing a helmet increases the risk of accidents among cyclists, as it provokes motorists to behave less carefully around them.

The other big inhibitor of risk awareness is youth. In that sense it may well be a good idea to harness children to the road-safety bandwagon, and educate them about the weapons of mass destruction that most of them will be in charge of one day. But instead of giving them authority over adults, it might be better to discourage the feeling of impunity they're likely to develop behind the wheel. Why not just leave it to the adults to belt up their children, and instead teach the children how to drive?