No easy road
THE FINAL figure for the festive season road death toll was announced last week and it made for grim reading: 1 465 people died in more than 1 200 road crashes.
Like previous years, driving under the influence and drunk driving – along with speeding, dangerous overtaking and the failure to use seatbelts – played a significant role in the number of fatalities on our roads, as noted by Transport Minister Ben Martins.
It has prompted the acting chief executive of the Road Traffic Management Corporation to to call for even sterner measures like an outright ban on drinking and driving.
Martins has now finally agreed to consider naming and shaming motorists in the rest of the country who are caught drinking and driving – a move pioneered by the Western Cape by the Cape Argus under the Lead SA campaign, in partnership with the Western Cape government’s Safely Home project.
Whether a total ban on getting behind the wheel if you have had a drink will be effective is debatable. Western Cape Transport MEC Robin Carlisle cautioned against such a ban and said countries that had achieved significant successes have been those that had cut its allowed blood-alcohol limit.
Another element to consider in the analysis of the road death toll is that many of those who died over the festive season were drunk pedestrians. How will a complete ban of alcohol consumption for motorists cover this anomaly?
LAST week the executive director of the Australian Automobile Association, Andrew McKellar, wrote in this newspaper that it took decades of sustained work to bring down that country’s road fatalities to just 5.8 deaths for 100 000 of the population.
McKellar said there was “no silver bullet” and Australia’s success relied heavily on behavioural change.
The name and shame campaign has proved effective in the Western Cape because it has forced motorists to think twice before getting behind the wheel drunk or under the influence.
It will certainly not hurt to roll out this highly successful pilot project to the rest of the country as a first step in dealing with our road death crisis.