Commuters walk on foot to travel - at the wanderers taxi rank in Johannesburg Photo Delwyn Verasamy
As families prepare to travel this festive season, one number should put every transport planner, engineer and policymaker on edge: 41.9%.
That’s the share of road deaths over the 2024/2025 holiday period that were pedestrians, according to the Road Traffic Management Corporation. Out of 1589 fatalities, 654 were people on foot – ordinary South Africans walking to work, public transport, church, or visit family.
These are not random accidents. They are the predictable result of a country where most roads are designed for vehicles, not people.
Our roads endanger those on foot
South Africa’s roads and intersections are built for speed and volume, not pedestrian safety. Road planning in South Africa prioritises traffic-related factors, such as the speed and volume of private vehicles, over considerations for pedestrian safety (Beukes & Zuidgeest, 2010). Pavements are narrow or broken. Crossings are unmarked or unlit. In too many places, there are no pedestrian routes at all.
The result is visible in every province: high-speed corridors cutting through dense townships; schoolchildren crossing multi-lane highways; communities without sidewalks connecting to taxi ranks or clinics. The tragedy is not new, but it is entirely preventable.
Johannesburg, our most resourced city, illustrates the problem’s scale. In 2025, it was ranked last out of 90 global cities for walkability, with an overall score of just 18 out of 100. If the country’s economic centre – with the greatest engineering and financial capacity – performs this poorly, smaller municipalities have little chance unless we rethink how we build and maintain our streets.
From enforcement to engineering
For years, South Africa’s festive road safety campaigns focused on behaviour: don’t drink and drive, buckle up, slow down. Those messages matter. But engineering should be our first line of defence – not our last.
Before law enforcement can be effective, we must fix physical risks.
- Power and maintain traffic signals at dangerous intersections, using solar where possible.
- Build continuous, well-lit pavements along major pedestrian corridors.
- Redesign intersections to shorten crossing distances and lower turning speeds.
- Publish pedestrian safety data – including signal uptime, compliant pavements, and injury rates – so progress can be tracked.
Start where people walk most
We can’t fix everything at once. But we can start where short, daily trips cluster – schools, clinics, taxi ranks, universities and markets.
Mapping and upgrading 400 to 800 metre walking catchments in each municipality would protect the people most at risk: children, commuters and the elderly.
In Johannesburg, stitching together the Braamfontein–Parktown–CBD corridor with continuous sidewalks, lighting, and marked crossings would show how a people-first design can work in practice. In smaller towns, that might mean simply resurfacing a shoulder or adding solar lighting where residents already walk.
The goal is the same everywhere: safe routes that let people move without fear.
A safer 2026 begins with design
The 2024/2025 festive season’s toll should be more than a statistic, it needs to be a mandate for change.
If four in 10 holiday road deaths are pedestrians, then our road crisis isn’t only about reckless driving, it’s about reckless planning and design. As we head into the 2025/2026 travel period, mayors, engineers and planners have a choice: keep widening roads for cars, or start building streets for people.
Walkability isn’t a luxury. It’s a life-saving necessity – and it’s how we make 2026 the year we start designing South Africa’s roads for everyone who uses them, not just those behind the wheel.
Themba Mangane is a traffic and transport engineer at Atana