ROAD DEATHS FIGURES SHOCK
DECEMBER CRASH FIGURES: GOVERNMENT INITIATIVES ARE ‘USELESS’ Much more must be done to stop this annual tragedy – Automobile Association.
Despite a drop in traffic over the holiday season, a decline of only 7% in road fatalities was recorded. The Automobile Association (AA) said this meant road safety had not improved.
Releasing the December road accident statistics yesterday, Transport Minister Fikile Mbalula said overall there were a total of 1 448 fatalities from 1 210 fatal crashes, which represented a 7% decline in fatalities and 10.3% decline in fatal accidents, year-onyear.
He said traffic volumes declined from 1 556 704 vehicles the previous year, to 1 419 782, with a significant decline in traffic volumes on the N4, at 110 676 vehicles recorded, compared to 208 883 vehicles recorded during the same period last year.
“The curfew was intensified, and South Africans are observing the curfew… I think people constrained themselves. The number of people travelling dropped because everyone is trying to be safe,” Mbalula said.
Despite this, driver fatalities still increased from 24.2% to 26.9%, passenger fatalities increased from 32.2% to 34.5% while cyclist fatalities stood at 1%.
He was encouraged that the reduction of fatalities in some provinces indicated a “positive contribution towards the realisation of our target of reducing fatalities on our roads”.
But AA spokesperson Layton Beard said government’s current road safety initiatives were useless and would never reduce fatalities and much more must be done to correct the “annual national disaster”.
“The minister notes that the reduction of pedestrian fatalities by 4.9% from the previous year is ‘notable’, but our view is that this is a nominal decrease. Pedestrians are an extremely vulnerable road-user group with the highest rate of deaths on our roads yet, it seems, no meaningful efforts to reduce these numbers are being made,” Beard said.
He said it had become routine to accept that road traffic fatalities would continue, or decrease nominally annually, without more being done to reverse this.
The traffic law enforcement review committee, established by former transport minister Dipuo Peters in 2016, made several recommendations regarding traffic law enforcement, which have been considered a major component of road safety.
“Among those was the doubling of traffic law enforcers on roads and the adoption of a graduated driver licensing system, with a 24-month probationary period for new drivers. These are practical measures to improve the situation on our roads but, sadly, little has been done to implement them,” Beard said.
Justice Project SA chair Howard Dembovsky said there had been an overall decrease in deaths, but the percentages of types of road users killed had shifted. “All it says is that the curfew was more effective in respect of pedestrians.”
Curfew was more effective in respect of pedestrians