Nick Clelland
EVERY year roughly 7 000 poor and marginalised people die on our roads. Without a pause for self-reflection, we’re quick to blame these pedestrians for their behaviour and lack of responsibility. It’s probably one of South Africa’s most malevolent cases of mass denial and hypocrisy.
Transport Minister Dipuo Peters last year confirmed that 14 000 lives are lost on the road each year.
The percentage of these that are pedestrians has been estimated to be anywhere from 40 to 50 percent, depending on who you talk to.
That we live in a country that cannot simply count the dead, never mind produce detailed, accurate and timely road death statistics is a national disgrace.
Accurate statistics that tell you where and when people die is the only way authorities can mount effective interventions to save lives – until then, they’re just grasping around in the dark with blue lights for effect.
But if you split road deaths equally – 7 000 each for those in vehicles and those who are pedestrians – you also effectively split the public discourse on road safety in South Africa.
The 7 000 lives lost in vehicles receive the lion’s share of media coverage, public outrage and government awareness campaigns.
Road safety is synonymous with billboards reminding you to “buckle-up”, TV ads showing the gruesome impact of drinking and driving, debates about minibus taxi aggression, investigative journalism into the perils of unlicensed drivers, road signs declaring that “speed kills” and banners warning you not to talk or SMS on your phone while driving.
So what about the other 7 000 lives?
Granted, there have been laudable projects and programmes from the government, NGOs and road safety organisations to reduce pedestrian deaths but the public discourse is brutal: these poor and marginalised people on foot are the architects of their own fate.
Moreover, their behaviour on the roadside puts those in vehicles at a greater risk.
And that isn’t just the view of the chattering classes either.
The government doesn’t do much to change that perspective with its Arrive Alive website that offers the following advice: “An alarming amount of pedestrians are killed each year on the roads of South Africa. Many informal settlements and squatter areas are situated next to highways and special care should be taken by pedestrians and motorists in avoiding accidents.”
It goes on to offer advice on how pedestrians should “ensure that you are clearly visible during the night. Always wear lightly coloured clothes or reflecting clothing”; “not walk in the road but on the pavement”; “avoid roads at all times when intoxicated”; and advice that pedestrian bridges should be used “even if it means walking further”.
So in summary, 7 000 marginalised poor people die each year because they don’t take their responsibilities as pedestrians seriously enough?
While there very well may be truth in the assertion, or at least in elements of it, the real problem is much more fundamental and rooted in how all of us behave.
Jaywalking. Just reading it, that word seems quaint and otherworldly. An offence policed in many other places on the planet, it is so commonplace in South Africa that the word itself has become a peculiarity. And yet we all do it, every single day.
The rules of the land are clear: Regulation 316 of the National Road Traffic Act sets out the duties of a pedestrian specifying a person “may cross a public road only at a pedestrian crossing or an intersection, or at a distance further than 50m from a pedestrian crossing or intersection”.
Take a walk down any street in any South African city and try to count how often people walk across the road wherever it suits them, walk across to the middle of the road and wait for traffic to clear from there, zigzag through cars to get across the road, ignore traffic lights and road signs, saunter along the road or dash across fast-moving traffic.
It happens so often that it has become the norm. And all of us do it every single day.
Local authorities, under huge financial pressure and clearly with other priorities in mind, have simply given up the ghost.
The notion of being arrested or ticketed for jaywalking is laughable. Local governments can’t administer serious traffic offences let alone minor insignificances.
The other great behavioural intervention, social stigma, has long disappeared.
No one looks down their nose at a friend or colleague who casually crosses the road illegally.
Ironically, many people still teach their children to “look right, look left and look right again” and then honour same in the breach time after time.
We are a country of anarchic, selfish pedestrians. All of us. It’s time for us to take a hard look in the mirror. We have all created the culture of pedestrian impunity. Those 7 000 lives lost are because poor people spend more of their lives walking than those of us who have cars – not because they act in any way different from the rest of us.
Their deaths are the consequence of how all of us act. It’s a tough pill to swallow.
In the same statement last year, Peters indicated that road accidents cost the economy R306 billion each year including a loss of manpower and skills due to fatalities and injuries, emergency medical services, post-crash services, such as road repairs and clean-up operations and compensation paid out by the Road Accident Fund.
Pedestrian behaviour is not some minor matter at the bottom of South Africa’s list of needs. All of our behaviour needs to change now or we will continue to lose thousands of lives and billions of rand every year.
l Clelland is the chief executive of Resolve Communications. He was a Member of Parliament and, more recently, the Western Cape Government’s Director of Strategic Communications where he conceptualised and launched their Safely Home road safety campaign.
l Follow him on Twitter @njclelland