Durban - Most car accidents in the city during the first half of 2014 were a result of rear-ending and - despite what everybody thinks - did not involve taxis or trucks.
Statistics from the eThekwini Transport Authority showed that cars accounted for 61 percent of accidents, light delivery vehicles 15 percent, minibus taxis 11 percent and trucks seven percent.
Overall, 230 people were killed and 1444 were seriously injured from January to June in 30 133 accidents.
Of these accidents, 8624 (29 percent) were caused by rear-ending, 5132 (17 percent) by sideswiping in the same direction, and 2505 (eight percent) involved a pedestrian.
The fourth-highest cause was vehicles colliding with fixed objects, in 2057 accidents.
Although accident numbers and fatalities continued to climb, the accident rate calculated against the number of vehicles now on Durban’s roads, had declined, according to the transport authority’s figures from 2000 to 2013.
Its statistics for that period showed the number of vehicles on the city’s roads had increased by 49 percent, from 544 500 to 810 484, while the number of accidents had increased by only 18 percent.
The report said: “The number of accidents has not risen as fast as the number of vehicles on the road; so the accident rate per 1000 vehicles has declined 21 percent since 2000.”
Petro Kruger, the director of the Road Safety Foundation, said South Africa had one of the worst road safety records in the world. She said she believed the problem lay in a combination of elements, including: poorly qualified and untrained drivers, driving unroadworthy or poorly maintained vehicles and poorly maintained roads.
She added that traffic law enforcement in various metros focused on income generation as opposed to road-user safety.
ROADWORTHINESS
“We need better training, especially for our professional drivers. The roadworthiness of public transport and freight vehicles needs to be elevated in priority to a level where bribery and corruption will no longer exist.”
Kruger said she also believed that drinking and driving or walking needed to become “socially unacceptable”, drivers should ensure all occupants used seat belts, parents needed to ensure their children were safely in a child seat, and road safety education should form part of the school curriculum from a young age.
Lizette Erasmus, the head of insurance services at Integri-Sure, said speeding was a major contributor to accidents. Recent studies had shown that 40 percent of drivers exceeded the 120km/h speed limit regularly, while up to 80 percent exceeded the 100km/h limit.
Alcohol use and general disregard for drunk driving was a “major ongoing issue”, she said.
Other contributing factors included a high rate of driver fatigue, the high number of unroadworthy vehicles being driven, and drivers not keeping a three-second safety gap between vehicles.
This was especially dangerous, she said, as “those three seconds apply to ideal circumstances, such as perfect road quality and weather with a vehicle 100 percent roadworthy”.
She added: “Bear in mind that if you drive a passenger vehicle at 100 km/h, you need 75 metres to make an emergency stop. Trucks need 125 metres to make a full stop.”
Transport authority officials said the eThekwini road safety plan for 2011 to 2016 was aligned to the Decade of Action for Road Safety 2011 to 2020 as proclaimed by the UN General Assembly in March 2010.
“The guiding principles underlying the plan for the Decade of Action are included in the ‘safe system’ approach. This aims to develop a road transport system that is better able to accommodate human error and take into consideration the vulnerability of the human body.” - The Mercury
IOL’s Dave Abrahams comments:
When I quoted these figures to David Frost, deputy director of Road Safety Management in the Western Cape department of community safety and programme manager of the Safely Home initiative for the department of transport and public works, he pointed out that, according to the latest statistics available (as at March 2011) there were 285 858 minibus taxis registered in South Africa, constituting 3.2 percent of the motorised vehicle population of 8 926 548.
If that percentage can be extrapolated to KwaZulu-Natal, then it is surely a cause for concern that a minority of vehicles - little more than three in every hundred - are involved in 11 out of every 100 accidents.