OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Tuesday 3.40pm.
TRANSPORT minister Dullah Omar on Tuesday blamed reckless, speeding drivers for hundreds of deaths on the roads as the festive season gets into full swing.
The holiday carnage has claimed 459 lives since December 1 and is expected to get worse this week as South Africans and foreign tourists flock to pristine beaches and game parks.
“The statistics show that bad behaviour is largely responsible for the recent fatalities,” Omar said.
“Our problem is to navigate the current holiday period with the minimum possible accidents and fatalities,” he said.
Road accidents are a year-round phenomenon in South Africa, claiming about 9000 lives in half a million crashes annually and costing the economy about R12,8-billion.
But December is the worst month by far with traffic volumes expected to jump by 50% in the two days before Christmas.
Last year, 791 people died in road crashes in December, down from 841 for the same period in 1997.
On Monday afternoon, a three-year-old boy and his father were killed when their truck hit another vehicle in the Eastern Cape province, which has reported 66 traffic deaths so far.
Sixty-three people were injured overnight, 10 of them seriously, in a pile-up on the N3 highway near Heidelberg.
The incident occurred just before midnight when a truck swerved to avoid another truck. The truck crossed the centre island, rolled over into the oncoming lane, causing several cars and a bus, which was carrying 41 passengers, to collide.