Pretoria – At least 60 people were injured when two Putco buses collided on the notorious Moloto Road near the South African Police Service K9 Unit on Tuesday.
Kameeldrift police spokesperson Sergeant Portia Maleka explained that one bus had been stationary in the passenger drop-off zone when another bus, travelling at high speed, hit it.
“The driver seemed to have misjudged the speed he needed to travel to stop in the same drop-off zone, and that lead to the bus hitting the other from behind,” said Maleka
She said that the impact of the collision sent the other bus off the road, which led to many injuries.
The 160km stretch of road runs through Mpumalanga, Gauteng and Limpopo and carries more than 150 000 commuters daily, most of them heading to and from work in Pretoria.
Moloto Road has been dubbed the "road of death" by roads agencies as a result of the high number of fatal accidents on the road over the years.
Reports indicate that the road carries more than 600 buses every day of the week.
Most buses belong to Putco, and they travel at high speeds along a narrow and potholed road.
Statistics from the period January 2012 to May 2014 showed that there were 489 crashes on Moloto Road, resulting in 158 fatalities and 594 serious injuries.
In November 2013, 30 people were killed in an accident between a bus and a truck near Kwaggafontein.
Two more people died a month later when a heavy goods truck collided with a delivery van.
A year later, the road claimed another life from a bus accident, that left 42 people injured, eight of them seriously.
These were in addition to many other Moloto accidents that occurred over the years.
The latest accident came eight months after the announcement of the Road Development Project, the multi-billion rand initiative launched by Transport Minister Dipuo Peters.
The project began in September, and during his State of the Nation Address earlier this month, President Jacob Zuma said: “On road infrastructure, South African National Roads Agency Limited has started with the planning phase of the R4.5 billion project to upgrade the current Moloto Road.”
Zuma also mentioned that during past year, South Africa had signed a co-operation agreement with the People’s Republic of China to build the Moloto Rail Development Corridor.
“We built a road and a train on Moloto Road so that lives could be saved because accidents were claiming a lot of lives at that place,” Zuma said.