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Opinion: An Open Letter To The Transport Minister

Feb 11, 2016 Transport, HCV, Trucking, RoadSafety, Traffic, crash,


Open letter to the Minister of Transport, the Honourable Ms Dipuo Peters

Johannesburg, South Africa, 10 February 2016
 
Dear Madame Minister,
 
I noted with great interest the Road Traffic Management Corporation’s advertorial published in several newspapers in late January, congratulating the country’s road safety activists, emergency personnel and health practitioners for their dedication over the festive season. It’s true – these people do remarkable work under difficult conditions, saving lives in situations that would be far more tragic were it not for their intervention – and they are to be lauded for going above and beyond what is required of them.
 
The same advertorial noted that 1.7 million vehicles were stopped and checked over the festive season, with more than 6,000 people being arrested for drunk driving.  Apparently more than 5,000 unroadworthy cars were pulled off the road, and 808 were arrested for speeding.
 
I have to ask then, if emergency services were doing such a great job, and so many people were being stopped, checked and even arrested, how it can possibly be that 1755 people died on South Africa’s roads in the six-week festive season, a 14 percent increase on the fatalities incurred in the previous year’s holiday period?
 
How can there be any good stories to tell in this scenario? How is the story of these multiple tragedies relegated to a paid-for insert buried in a weekly paper, with yet another ‘firm’ statement from the Minister exclaiming that ‘Enough is enough’.
 
If we really have had enough of the carnage on our roads – which actually continues all year round – what is it that the Minister and all the organs of state are doing to stop it recurring, because it is clear that stopping people, arresting people, and taking unroadworthy cars off the road is not working.
 
It is clear from this most recent collection of statistics that punitive measures are not working – they never have, and it’s clear that they never will. While ongoing driver education seems to have made little difference historically, the 2015/2016 RTMC approach of policing in the complete absence of any driver education programme such as ArriveAlive has had fatal consequences.
 
What are we doing to educate our people about why they need to wear seatbelts at all times, even when they’re just popping around the corner to buy a bottle of milk? How are we teaching people to think of the consequences of their actions, and to understand that their refusal to obey the rules of the road threatens lives – their own and the lives of others? With corruption the norm at many licensing stations, where road users’ ability to pay a bribe is being tested rather than their knowledge of the rules of the road, what is the Department of Transport doing to ensure that road users are educated about the importance of sticking to the law?
 
We need a complete change in approach, and the first positive step is to move away from spin doctoring.
 
We need frequent roadworthiness tests on all vehicles. We need to recruit traffic officials who appreciate the significance of being a representative of the law and of being a guardian of the safety of citizens – and we need to remunerate them sufficiently to ensure that they are "un-corruptible". We need to find new ways of teaching South Africans about WHY we need to adhere to the rules of the road – for example why is the Department of Transport not working with the Department of Basic Education to place an increased focus on including citizenship in the curriculum – which would include the basics of respecting the lives of other road users?
 
Sitting every January saying the same things as we did the year before does not show any signs of lessons learned, of new strategies, or of any care for the people that use South Africa’s roads. We’ve got to change the way we’ve always done things, or we are going to see the same carnage on our roads, year after year after year.
 
Yours sincerely,
Chris Barry
Managing Director
Heavy Commercial Vehicle Underwriting Managers (HCV)
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