African countries need to tighten their road traffic enforcement laws or risk losing more lives in avoidable road crashes. This was one of the issues that emerged at the two-day road safety conference held in Johannesburg recently.
African countries need to tighten their road traffic enforcement laws or risk losing more lives in avoidable road crashes. This was one of the issues that emerged at the two-day road safety conference held in Johannesburg recently.
Several countries at the conference came under sharp criticism for an alleged failure to enforce laws that aim to curb road deaths. South African drivers were viewed to be among the worst culprits in terms of not wearing seat belts and adhering to road safety laws.
Speaking to SAnews on the sidelines of the conference, Road Traffic Management Corporation acting CEO Collins Letsoalo said South Africans needed to understand that “killing people on the road” was murder.
“South Africans are not doing the simplest of things, like wearing a seat belt and they don't see it as a problem. It has been proven that if we can increase our seat belt wearing rate to double what we have now, we would have a 30% reduction in road fatalities,” Letsoalo said.
Letsoalo said other countries had done the simplest of things to reduce road accidents and that was to focus on drunk driving and seat belt usage. Speeding, drunk driving, and failure to wear seat belts and helmets remained a critical challenge for South African authorities.
Letsoalo said South Africa was losing between 280 and 350 people to road crashes every week. About 40% of those killed were pedestrians. At present 14 000 people a year die on South Africa's roads, with accidents reportedly costing the economy R307 billion a year. – SAnews.gov.za
