An aerial view shows heavy traffic on the N1 North at the Pumulani Toll as the last batch of holidaymakers
make their way to Limpopo and neighbouring countries. Photo CMTV
On Monday, 28 December 2025, I stood over the coffin of a young man in the courtyard of his home.
At the grave site, I watched his ailing mother in a wheelchair and his teary young children dropping flowers into the grave, with searing pain written all over their faces. I felt a lot more than sadness. I felt anger. Anger at the fact that it seems like there is no working strategy to deal with long-distance accidents during the Easter and December holidays in South Africa.
Every Easter and December, South Africans are subjected to a grim and familiar ritual. Senior government officials, often led by ministers, appear before the nation to announce road accident statistics, announce the deployment of traffic police and exhort the drivers to drive safely and the pedestrians to be careful.
The tone is sombre, the numbers are devastating and the message is repetitive: too many lives have been lost. Yet year after year, one fundamental question remains largely unanswered.
What is being done, from a systemic and preventative perspective, to stop these long-distance travelling-related deaths from happening in the first place, beyond deploying traffic officers and reporting fatalities after the fact?
South Africa’s horrific festive-season road toll is not merely a matter of reckless driving or weak enforcement. It is, at its core, a failure of public transport policy, spatial planning and long-term governance.
It reflects a country that continues to force millions of people onto long, dangerous road journeys because it has failed to provide safe, affordable and reliable alternatives for long-distance travel.
The sad story started painfully for me last December while driving from Johannesburg to my home in the Eastern Cape, a journey that countless South Africans make during the festive season.
Somewhere along the N1, my phone vibrated with a message from a friend who was ahead of me, travelling on the same route. He told me that a young man, who was my younger brother’s friend, had been involved in a serious accident a few hours earlier.
By the time the message reached me, the young man and a child had already lost their lives. A trailer had dislodged from another vehicle, struck them and ended two lives in an instant. Hours later, I passed the accident scene and the trailer was still there. What struck me most was not only the grief but the realisation that this was not an unpredictable or unavoidable event.
It was the foreseeable outcome of a transport system that channels millions of people onto congested, unsafe highways at the same times of year, often in taxis and trucks that are poorly maintained and driven under conditions of extreme fatigue.
South Africa records one of the highest road fatality rates in the world. The Road Traffic Management Corporation is reported to have stated that over 12,000 people die on South African roads annually, with Easter and December accounting for a disproportionate share. Long-distance travel plays a significant role in this carnage.
Drivers travel hundreds, sometimes more than a thousand kilometres, often overnight, sharing roads dominated by heavy trucks, unsafe trailers and vehicles carrying families desperate to reach home. Yet the state’s response appears stubbornly narrow, focusing on roadblocks, visible policing and public appeals for better behaviour.
This approach treats road deaths as a law-enforcement problem rather than as a systemic transport policy failure. It places responsibility almost entirely on individual drivers while ignoring the structural reality that many South Africans simply have no viable alternative to driving long distances.
Good governance demands a far more uncomfortable question: why does a modern economy still lack safe, accessible long-distance public transport for ordinary citizens?
Globally, countries that have successfully reduced road fatalities have done so by investing in safer transport systems and encouraging people to shift away from private road travel.
In Japan, the introduction of high-speed rail transformed long-distance travel. The Shinkansen has operated for decades without comparative passenger fatalities caused by a train accident.
In France and Spain, high-speed rail has significantly reduced domestic car travel between major cities, lowering road deaths while boosting economic integration. These outcomes were not achieved through policing alone but through deliberate public investment in alternatives that are safer by design.
Even middle-income countries with large geographies offer important lessons.
Brazil and Indonesia have expanded affordable domestic air travel through regulatory reforms and infrastructure investment, reducing the need for long-haul road journeys. In parts of Europe, modern, well-regulated long-distance coach systems provide safe and reliable alternatives to driving, supported by strict vehicle standards and professionalised driver management.
South Africa once aspired to similar outcomes. Passenger rail was historically a backbone of long-distance travel, connecting cities and rural regions.
Today, that system is largely dysfunctional. Intercity rail is unreliable or non-existent for most citizens and long-distance travel has been left to private cars, minibus taxis and overburdened highways. This is not simply a transport issue; it is a public safety crisis.
High-speed or even medium-speed intercity rail linking Johannesburg, Durban, Cape Town, Gqeberha, Polokwane, Mangaung, Mafikeng, Kimberly and other cities should be understood not as a luxury megaproject but as a life-saving intervention.
Every train carrying festive-season travellers would remove hundreds of cars from the road, reduce driver fatigue and lower exposure to deadly collisions involving trucks and trailers.
African examples already exist. Morocco’s investment in high-speed rail demonstrates that such infrastructure is possible on the continent when political will and long-term planning align.
Affordable domestic air travel is another underutilised solution. For many South Africans, flying remains prohibitively expensive, particularly during peak periods. Strategic government action, including airport fee regulation, support for competition on key domestic routes and targeted subsidies for underserved regions, could make air travel a realistic alternative for long-distance festive travel.
Each full flight represents hundreds of potential road journeys that never happen.
What makes this failure more troubling is that South Africa already subscribes to the relevant policy frameworks. The United Nations’ Decade of Action for Road Safety explicitly emphasises safer transport systems, not only safer roads and better enforcement.
The African Union’s Agenda 2063 calls for integrated, efficient, and safe transport infrastructure as a foundation for development. South Africa’s own National Development Plan 2030 envisages a decisive shift from road-based transport to rail and public transport for both people and goods. The problem is not a lack of policy vision but a persistent inability to implement it.
Festive season road safety campaigns often emphasise individual behaviour, urging drivers to slow down, rest and avoid alcohol. While these messages are important, they obscure a deeper truth.
When a system leaves people with no safe, affordable alternative but to drive long distances under dangerous conditions, blaming individuals becomes a form of policy avoidance. Road deaths, in this context, are not random tragedies. They are predictable outcomes of structural neglect.
Imagine a different kind of festive-season briefing, one in which ministers report the percentage of festive travellers who used rail or air instead of roads.
Where officials report information on, for example, new intercity trains reducing night-time long-distance driving by half.
Imagine a government able to say that a significant proportion of long-distance festive travellers used trains or planes instead of roads, that night-time long-haul driving declined sharply and that public transport investment directly saved lives.
That is what a systems-focused approach to road safety would look like.
When I think back to my brother’s friend and the child who died that December, I am reminded that road accidents are not random events.
They are policy outcomes. We need more than statistics and speeches. We need structural courage, to invest in long-distance public transport, to modernise rail, to make flying affordable and to treat road safety as a systems issue, not a seasonal press conference.
We require the courage to fix the systems that made their deaths possible. Until South Africa treats long-distance public transport as a central pillar of road safety, tourism, economic growth and good governance, festive seasons will continue to be marked by the same announcements, the same grief and the same unanswered question: why were people still forced onto deadly roads in the first place?
Lonwabo Patrick Kulati is the chief executive of Good Governance Africa’s Southern African regional office