Did the road death toll indeed decrease this past holiday season? {writer: Piet Coetzer}

Judged by provincial statistics released by the government, the fatalities on South African roads did decrease this past holiday season. By all indications, the introduction of road blocks and a zero-tolerance policy has had the desired results.

There are also plans to extend the approach to beyond the festive and other traditionally high traffic volume holiday periods, and even a year-round campaign.

The death toll this past December officially stood at 1 050, which if correct is almost 300 less than the 1 348 deaths in December 2008.

It seems the vigorous law enforcement prompted by Transport Minister Sbu Ndebele’s zero-tolerance approach should be thanked for that.

If this programme, with its increased policing, had kicked in earlier, the picture might have been considerably better and more lives might have been saved.

It also seems there were widespread problems with the supply of disposable breathalysers, which the minister announced at the kick-off of the “Arrive Alive” campaign. The intention of these gadgets was to make it possible for motorists to test their own blood alcohol levels before undertaking a trip.

During the first half of December, before the law enforcement programme kicked in, the death toll was actually rising and reaching figures double that of the previous year.

But once the roadblocks, vehicle checks, alcohol tests and other measures fully kicked in around mid-December, the official death toll apparently decreased dramatically.

This was confirmed by Transport ministry spokesperson, Logan Maistry.

Alternative statistics

However, independent road safety journalist and managing director of driving.co.za, Rob Handfield-Jones rejected all of this as nonsense. According to him, the figures have been fiddled with by the government.

In a statement, he makes the startling claim that the death toll for December 2009 had actually increased by 16% compared to December 2008.

What is more, Handfield-Jones implies that the massive law enforcement effort failed. He says the death toll climbed despite around 285 000 speeding tickets being issued – proving, according to him, that speed control has once again been shown to be ineffective at reducing road deaths.

In an online column, Handfield-Jones makes what seems to be a solid case in exposing how Minister Ndebele is making wild, unsubstantiated claims and how the media is reporting incorrect figures without bothering to check them against the correct and available statistics.

Maistry, however, stresses that the figures released by the Transport department are only preliminary.

Nonetheless, he says, each accident is reported to the Road Traffic Management Corporation (RTMC), a body that was created to take charge of vehicle registration, traffic information systems, public communication and traffic law enforcement.

All of these accidents reported to the RTMC then are confirmed individually by police stations around the country.

This is how the Transport department arrived at its (preliminary) official death toll, which shows 298 less fatalities this December compared to the previous year.

Maistry says his department is not entering into any dispute with Handfield-Jones and has no reason to fiddle with figures. “Our aim is to save lives. Road deaths are not mere statistics. Just one road death is one too many,” he says.

However, there has been criticism of this “one road death is one too many” statement as being a cynical platitude as well as of Maistry’s failure to explain the discrepancy in figures.

Be that as it may, preliminary indications are that of the 1 050 deaths, 276 were drivers, 419 passengers and 355 pedestrians. A breakdown of deaths by province had not yet been compiled.

During December, more than 285 000 fines were issued to drivers for speeding, 3 487 drivers were nabbed for drunken driving, and 244 for reckless and negligent driving. Officials had impounded 2 517 vehicles for not being roadworthy.

“We found speed to be the biggest cause of road accidents,” says Maistry, contradicting Handfield-Jones’ claim that speed control did not reduce road deaths.

Maistry says the first United Nations Global Ministerial Conference on Road Safety held in Russia recently, and which was attended by Ndebele, confirmed that speed is the greatest contributor to the more than 3 400 deaths every day due to road accidents around the world.

Impact of long delays

However, there seems to be a strong opinion that impatience – caused by long delays as a result of factors such as inefficiency at toll gates, roadworks and traffic congestion in peak holiday times – is perhaps an even greater contributor.

Dangerous risk-taking to ‘make up’ time is often related to these delays.

Maistry says impatience and speed go hand in hand. He singles out fatigue as the other major contributor, calling it the silent killer because one cannot test for fatigue as with drunken driving or speed.

“We would like to believe that our law enforcement campaign through roadblocks and other measures and the Arrive Alive campaign made a difference this year and achieved the lower death toll,” he says.

“We will be intensifying and applying our zero-tolerance approach towards all traffic offences beyond the festive season as part of the government’s strategy to address the high number of road accidents on our roads 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.”

If the Transport department’s figures are reliable, it certainly does seem that the intensified law enforcement campaign indeed made a difference. Although law enforcement had been stepped up since 1 December, roadblocks and other law enforcement measures were increased dramatically from mid-December onward.

That may explain why from 1 to 17 December, 448 road deaths had been reported – double the 228 people killed during the same period the previous year – and why since 17 December, after the zero tolerance campaign truly kicked in, the statistics started showing a decline in deaths compared to the previous year.

Maistry also attributed much of the success for apprehending almost 3 500 drunken drivers to the use of the Dräger breath analyser, a portable machine that eliminates the need for blood tests and allows for the instant arrest of transgressors. It also eliminates what has been described as the “messy chain of evidence” problems, and shortens the waiting period to achieve prosecutions.

Substantiating his claim that there had actually been a 16% increase in road deaths this festive season, Handfield-Jones said that the actual death toll for December 2008 had been 908 and not the 1 348 claimed by the Department of Transport – which means 142 more people died in December 2009 than in December 2008.

Handfield-Jones further rejects media claims saying road crashes in South Africa caused the loss of 16 000 lives, half of them pedestrians, each year at a cost of more than R14 billion to the country.

He says available Department of Transport figures actually show that the 2008 road death toll was 14 627, of which only 36% were pedestrians, and that the actual cost to the economy was a whopping R43bn.

Handfield-Jones further points out that while Arrive Alive’s aim was to reduce road deaths by 5% per annum from 1998 onward, the 1998 death toll was 9 468, while the 2008 death toll was 14 627. In his opinion, this clearly shows that the campaign was not working.

He adds that the main cause of crashes is driver error resulting from “the dated licensing system and enforcement aimed at profit rather than safety”.