Education is the answer

I would like to respond to the bull bar article in the June issue. I’m a medical practitioner with 50 years of experience, and have been crisscrossing Africa with a 4x4 for the last 25 years. Everything in life involves risk. In the medical world, we speak of “relative risk”, big or small. We base our decisions on the relative risk factors, and you can do the same if you have to decide on a bull bar. The risk to a pedestrian in a car accident is high, whether or not the vehicle has a bull bar. The risk for the occupants is low compared to the pedestrian, but higher in the vehicle that doesn’t have a bull bar. The same applies if a large animal runs out in front of you. In the case of a head-on collision, the risk is also higher without a bull bar than with one. The risk that the airbags don’t deploy in an accident is relatively low. Of course, this is providing the bull bar meets the right standards and was professionally installed. In the open, you can hit obstacles such as trees or rocks that pose a high risk – to the extent that you could be stranded. So, if you visit distant places with bad roads and your vehicle hits something that results in you not being able to proceed, everyone in the vehicle is at serious risk. In this case, you would be more protected with a bull bar. Should bull bars be declared illegal? If you look at the risk profile here in Africa, it doesn’t make sense to ban them. Should that happen, many more lives will be jeopardised. You don’t prevent pedestrian deaths by banning bull bars, but by educating people to obey the rules of the road at all times.