Fellow scribe and driving skills specialist Rob Handfield-Jones has come out firing against the Department of Transport for dismally failing in its duty to curtail South Africa’s astronomical road fatalities.
Backed by the Automobile Association (AA), Drive Alive and the Committee for Active Road Safety (Cars), he also accused the Arrive Alive campaign of implementing ineffective road safety initiatives.
“Arrive Alive’s goal was to reduce crashes by 5% a year from 1998. Instead, road death rates have spiralled to levels last seen in 1992,” he said.
The AA said it had also encountered obstacles and it seemed apparent there was no clear and holistic plan in place to address the growing problem. AA managing director Ed Kok said: “Our efforts to represent our members’ interests to the transport department have largely been met by silence.”
Kok was critical of what he called the “consistent failure” of government’s road safety programmes. This was echoed by Drive Alive founder and traffic safety lobbyist Moira Winslow. “The transport department cannot continue to ‘go it alone’. It must seek the input of the private sector, which has developed local training solutions proven to make drivers safer,” she said.
Cars chairperson Ian Auret said he felt the government had gathered enough information to take decisive action. “Each new road safety plan seems to be clutching at straws. We need to see the statistics being turned into results,” he said. One of the major international measures of road safety is how many fatalities occur per 100-million vehicle kilometres travelled.
Handfield-Jones said that, according to the Department of Transport’s Wendy Watson, additional law enforcement was the government’s preferred priority. “A neater and cheaper solution is driving skills training,” he countered.
“Following too closely, for example, causes around 30% of all collisions. It’s a driving error which is very difficult to police, yet quickly rectified by training. There are numerous similar examples,” he said.
“Companies that train their employees in driving skills often report that collision rates have dropped by half. Trained drivers maintain high safety levels without a patrol car in their rear-view mirrors.”
Handfield‒Jones advised the public to attend defensive driving skills courses to compensate for the poor state of traffic safety. He urged the Minister of Transport, Jeff Radebe, to make driver training his department’s top priority and replace the K53 licence system with what he called a “real-world driving skills curriculum”.
But while Handfield-Jones makes a call to educate the driving public, the various traffic authorities need to take a different approach to road safety. Fleecing motorists by means of high-tech traffic equipment benefits their coffers immensely and it seems that manning these devices is more cost-effective than to have a highly visible presence and skilled, educated road users.
The total disrespect of the law shown by certain road users needs to be addressed too. The resentment and disrespect that most motorists harbour toward traffic officials who ignore aggressive road users is not constructive. If officials clamped down on bad driving rather than merely collecting speeding fines, the resultant change in motorists’ attitude could have meaningful and positive long-term results.
Pedestrian deaths are extremely high, too, and the government needs to take a long, hard look at itself, its traffic laws, its policies and those that have a thankless task of enforcing those laws.
The country is going forward on almost every level — a strong rand, excellent exports and a growing economy are sure signs that we’re doing most things right.
Fatalities per 100-million vehicle kilometres travelled in South Africa:
1992 10,4 — Source: AA Old Mutual Annual Traffic Safety Audit: 1992
1998 6,9 — Source: AA Old Mutual Annual Traffic Safety Audit: 1998
2004 10,2 — Source: South African Department of Transport (This figure may not be final. The 2003 figure was 10.4)
The United States Department of Transport currently gives the US fatalities per 100-million kilometres as 0,91 — this makes it more
than 11 times safer to drive in the US than in South Africa.