When one reads stories on road safety in the media, one often sees officials exhorting motorists to be ‘law-abiding’. In the comments sections of online articles, and the letters pages of newspapers, one likewise sees readers making the same call, or claiming that they are writing ‘on behalf of law-abiding drivers’.

Photo credit: Sheila Stuurman

Well firstly, I must ask where all these ‘law-abiding’ drivers are. Not on South Africa’s roads, judging by our fatality rates. Indeed, I see drivers routinely proceeding with practised indifference for a slew of traffic laws, and one of the main problems on our roads actually seems to be that we don’t have enough law-abiding drivers. But what of the perception that being a ‘law-abiding’ driver is adequate to prevent crashes? Bad news: it’s not.

Consider this scenario: you are approaching an intersection at which a car is waiting to turn right across your path. In terms of traffic law, there is no danger present since you are a ‘law-abiding’ driver and aren’t going to erratically swerve into him, and he’s stopped anyway and waiting for you. For the purposes of traffic law, it is also irrelevant that you will shortly enter a scenario which places you just one metre away from a head-on crash at a speed of possibly 120km/h. However, you face a mountain of obstacles, none of which have been legislated upon. What, for instance, if the other driver doesn’t check properly and turns in front of you? The law offers no suggestion that such a thing might happen, and no guidance on how to prevent or cope with it. The law presumes that the other driver will be as ‘law abiding’ as you. Now ask yourself what if he has a clutch or gearbox failure and the vehicle lurches into your path uncontrollably? Here too, the law is silent. What if his foot slips off the brake or clutch? What if he’s hit from behind? The law does not demand that drivers keep their wheels straight wherever possible while waiting to turn right across traffic, so they generally don’t. This means that the car will be pushed into your path in the event of a rear impact. Et cetera.

Negligence

What I’m saying is that hundreds of times a day your life is placed at risk from things that have never appeared on the statute books and never will. So why, you may ask, don’t we write all these things into law instead of having general provisions about ‘negligence’ and driving with ‘care’?

There are two reasons. Firstly, if we had to codify every single potential hazard which a motorist might conceivably face into law, the Road Traffic Act in its printed form would fill a concert hall. Secondly, the Act makes the basic and sensible assumption that only people who have already been equipped with sufficient skills to recognise hazards and judge the extent of danger will be driving on public roads and thus be subject to the provisions of the Act. To this end, the Act provides for a driving test. It also provides for the appointment and testing of learner driving instructors, and of inspectors of licensing to excercise oversight.

The problem is that the driving test it comes from an era half a decade before the first cars even got airbags in South Africa and is thus entirely out of date. This was not always the case, of course, but the real problem arose with government’s emasculation of the driving instructor’s competency test in 1996. This caused a flight of skills from the teaching process – the really professional instructors, the ones who could communicate all those extra aspects and details above and beyond the basic requirements of the licence test, were, in many cases, forced out of the industry by under-skilled “instructors” who charged (and continue to charge) cut-throat rates for abysmal tuition. This resulted in the complete bypassing of the Act’s unspoken premise that the detail of driving not contained in legislation would taught to learner drivers by skilled instructors. The Road Traffic Act of 1989 was the most sweeping re-write of traffic legislation in 40 years – it was written alongside the K53 licence test and both took effect on the same day. The Act recognised the role of quality instructors as a critical component of the system, and then, when the Act was updated in 1996, this principle was overturned for reasons that have never been adequately explained.

Corruption

Around the same time, the inspectorate of licensing dwindled to an insignificant appendage with fewer than six inspectors to supervise over 200 testing stations. Combined with the rampant corruption in licensing, we thus arrive at the present day where new drivers lack almost all of the major skills needed to keep them alive. This has resulted from the holes in the system not only getting bigger, but being aligned perfectly to allow new drivers to slip through a cascade of failures onto the roads, where many are promptly killed.

And this is one of the reasons why traffic law is no longer effective at preventing crashes – it can only do so when all road users (including pedestrians) in close proximity on a given stretch of road are being ‘law abiding’. The moment any single one disobeys the law, the entire framework of traffic legislation suffers a micro-collapse, because licence-level training no longer includes teaching drivers a Plan B to keep them safe in the event of someone else’s error. That was the primary cause of the high fatality rates in the 1970s and 1980s, and we had no sooner addressed the problem and started to enjoy results when the sweep of a legislative pen took us back to square one. Consequently, our entire traffic system operates on luck, rather than skill, and when multiple road users break the law simultaneously, the result is almost always a crash.

When I got into the driver training business more than two decades ago, trainees we saw generally grasped the basics and had a bit more knowledge besides. Nowadays though, we are not only having to teach defensive driving, but in very many cases, remind people about adherence to basic traffic laws. Twenty years ago, we saw one trainee with an obviously fake or irregular licence who couldn’t actually drive properly every three months. Now we see one a week and in one particularly bad case recently, I saw three in a single day. I therefore regard claims of adherence to the law by rank-and-file drivers as unjustifiable. There is no empirical evidence to suggest that the majority of drivers in South Africa are law-abiding, and even those who are mostly lack the defensive skills to avoid their non-compliant opponents on the road. It is yet another hurdle which the Department of Transport will have to face up to if it wishes to see change visited upon our highways and byways.

I try to avoid taking unnecessarily gratuitous pot-shots at the Minister of Transport and his lackeys. It’s just too easy. But there are limits, and when

Photo credit: UK Road Safety

Bluntly, road carnage does not start and stop as decreed by government functionaries – rather, it exists and blossoms due to long-term failure of those functionaries to implement policies to curb it. I have said many times that people will only drive as badly as their governments allow them to. In the UK and USA, they thus drive very well. In South Africa they drive like maniacs. It’s almost unarguable that the Minister is the actual cause of road carnage, not South Africa’s saviour from it. When he took over his current office, he inherited a right royal mess, but he also inherited numerous suggestions to solve the problem from several people who actually make a career out of road safety, myself included. I can’t talk for others, but one of my many contributions to the proceedings was to spend an hour of my time in Parliament, addressing the Portfolio Committee on Transport. During this address, I proposed five categories of intervention which would result in a rapid change in the road safety landscape at relatively low cost.

Political will

Now, the Chair of that committee was Jeremy Cronin who is currently the Deputy Minister of Transport. On that day, the 28th of May 2008, he responded that “…most of your proposal can be implemented without new regulation…” or words to that effect. In other words, he identified the key point without any prompting from me: South Africa has all the structures in place to introduce rapid improvements to road safety. All that is lacking is the application of thought, research and political will. What’s strange is that the Deputy Minister has the solutions at his fingertips, but the Minister himself, inexplicably, refuses to take advantage of this knowledge. The blame for the continued carnage on our roads therefore falls fairly and squarely on the Minister’s shoulders. Little wonder that his tenure resulted in 2011showing the single biggest year-on-year increase in the Easter road death toll in South Africa’s history.

This is not the first time the Minister has talked about halving road deaths, and he has previously claimed they will be halved by the middle of the current decade. This is despite the catastrophe of licensing, the cataclysm of roadworthiness, the epidemic of drunken driving and the mounds of rubble our roads are rapidly being reduced to. In truth, it is naive to hope that we could reduce road deaths from their current official level of about 15000 to 7500 in the next four years, because that would require fatality rates to achieve levels 25% lower than the all-time low which was achieved in 1998. The rate subsequently doubled by 2006, to which the DoT’s response was to stop making it public. I believe the fatality rate to probably have increased by another third since then.

Cutting the rate to 30% of its current level, which is about what would be required to yield a death toll of 7500, is currently unworkable in a mere four years, because there is no realistic plan to achieve it and no money either. Leaving aside the posturing and politicking, if someone put such a task on my desk as an entrepreneurial opportunity, I would reject it as impossible unless it came with a cheque for R10Bn to throw at the problem, cheap considering that traffic crashes cost the country approximately R100Bn per annum. Since the DoT has spent only approximately half of that amount on direct road safety development (ie., through public education, tweaks to the licensing system, improvement in enforcement, etc.) over the past 14 years, it is immediately clear that, all other considerations aside, road safety improvement is under-funded.

Advice

I’m not convinced the Minister actually knows any of this, and it’s arguable that he either isn’t being given good advice, or isn’t taking it before he stands up and speaks. A combination of both is perhaps the best explanation if one is to judge by the utterances on vehicle population made by his advisor, Themba Vundla, at a conference a couple of months ago, and the manner in which Ndebele apparently believes he can regulate road safety by decree. Even the Acting CEO of the RTMC, Collins Letsoalo, is getting in on things, having been quoted recently as saying that about three-quarters of all vehicles are unroadworthy. This is in contrast to the RTMC’s most recent official stats bundle which pegs the percentage at about 6%. The frequency with which the RTMC’s spokespeople invent statistics when they’re required to make a public statement is disturbing, and when the man running road safety doesn’t have a handle on things, it follows that his Minister won’t have either. This is a major contributor to Ndebele being regrettably lampoonable.

Through all of this there has been very little contribution from Jeremy Cronin in the two years since he took office. Considering that he’s the one political functionary in the DoT with a good working knowledge of road safety, one gains the distinct impression he’s being muzzled so as not to create accidental conflict by demonstrating how considerably better-informed he is than his boss.

The whole fracas must be viewed in the context of the mismanagement happening in other functions which fall under the Department of Transport, and the wholesale abuse of the DoT as a means to impose a raft of stealth taxes. Surely the time has now come for President Zuma to step in, divide road safety from the Department of Transport as a separate ministry and appoint Cronin as Minister of Road Safety? The next positive step would be to replace Ndebele with someone under whom transport in South Africa might regain direction after years of withering.

Photo credit: Gary Mcinnes

Transport is generally the second-biggest expense in most households, running second only to the roof over one’s head, and edging out groceries and housewares. With such a huge whack of one’s disposable income going on transport, it is a very important to vote for a political party that treats the issue with respect. Since your choices boil down to ‘ANC’ or ‘other’, and since the ANC has been in government since 1994, allow me to run through the ANC’s track record in the arena of transport over that time.

Starting in 1994, they systematically emasculated the railways. Rail transport has floundered, recently reaching an all-time low when the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (Prasa) shut down the Shosholoza Meyl passenger train between Johannesburg and Cape Town. This was allegedly due to profitability issues, but it was widely reported (and never denied by the Department of Transport) that the rolling stock was actually unsafe for mainline use.

The ANC’s indifference to rail transport caused a massive swing towards trucking and it is no coincidence that the road fatality rate went into a zoom climb starting in 1998 as the number of trucks on the road exceeded the traffic police’s resources and competence. The paucity of weighbridges and preference to enforce speed instead of moving violations were directly responsible for the complete destruction of the N3 to Durban by overloaded trucks, resulting in it being rebuilt and tolled so heavily that it’s now cheaper to fly to Durban than drive! Then the DoT built Durban’s new airport in the middle of nowhere, tolled the road access to it and admitted, just three days after the airport opened, that the siting of the airport had been a mistake. R7 Billion later. Oh well, it’s only tax money.

Private

One of the most catastrophic decisions of the ANC in terms of its effect on your and my pockets was to take numerous functions which were previously part of the Department of Transport and transfer them into private companies created by Acts of Parliament. Examples are SANRAL, the Road Traffic Management Corporation, the Civil Aviation Authority, the Airports Company of South Africa, Air Traffic and Navigation Services, and several others, all with government as the sole shareholder. The purpose of this was simple: the cost of running them was transferred to the private sector and is covered by charging citizens for services which were previously covered by tax revenue. The problem is that taxation levels have not been reduced commensurately with the reduction in costs to the Department of Transport.

We therefore end up paying for these services twice and because these entities are “private companies” they can charge VAT as well, another handy windfall. Roads for example, used to be funded by taxation. Now they are funded by tolls, but we still pay the taxation. All of these “public entities” as the DoT euphemistically calls them, are nothing more than stealth tax generators with the sole aim of externalising the responsibilities of government. This would worry me less if I hadn’t read recently that corruption might currently be costing South Africa 20% of its GDP. If our tax money wasn’t being stolen, we wouldn’t need to pay more, and since the ANC has been the sole party in government since 1994, the buck stops at Luthili House.

The ANC’s comic-opera inability to exercise control over Road Accident Fund is a matter of public record. The deficit currently stands in excess of R40Bn, not least because the ANC has completely lost control of road safety as well – hospital beds and rehabilitation centres are filling up with crash victims at a rate last seen when PW Botha was president. These are all predictable consequences of undermining licensing oversight, appointing officials with little regard for competence, focusing road enforcement almost solely on revenue generation, and removing basics like a proper instructor’s test for learner driver instructors.

Then there is the Metro Police, another ANC experiment which has become a virtual byword for corruption, bribery, atrocious driving and revenue collection ahead of all other priorities. Not to mention the blatant and unashamed disregard for the law as it suits them, most recently typified by the issuing of thousands of fines against the stipulations of Section 30 of the AARTO Act.

Mistake

The implementation of E-Natis in 2007 brought the licensing system to a halt and caused a seven percent reduction in new vehicle sales in the month it was introduced, representing hundreds of millions in lost GDP. The DoT was warned that implementing it all in one go would be a mistake, but they still did it, and the effect on the economy was massive.

I’d have to write several more pages to detail all the ways in which the ANC has reduced transport to a disjointed catastrophe over the past 17 years. I haven’t even mentioned AARTO yet, nor all the other legislative bungles, nor SAA, nor the proposal to use motorists as cash cows to fund bankrupt municipalities in KZN via a fuel levy, nor the outrageous harbour costs which have driven shipping business to Mozambique, nor the ‘high-cube’ container fiasco which almost shut road transport down last year, nor the fact that almost 60% of drivers killed in traffic crashes are drunk. Most importantly, I haven’t raised the question of why a succession of ANC transport ministers has sat by in paralysis while this shambles rumbled over the horizon at vast cost to citizens.

Of course, I could be flippant and say that all of the aforegoing presents a wonderful business opportunity in my line of work, and the more people die and the higher motoring costs go, the better business case exists for the company I run. This is undeniable, but irrelevant, because my line of business does not exempt me personally from transport risks, nor from transport costs. I have no faith that the ANC has taken transport remotely seriously enough at any level of government to deserve my vote and I will accordingly withhold it from them later today. If your voting mind is not made up, why not choose transport as your election issue? Join me in making your cross under ‘other’ and telling the ANC that we, the users of transport and the consumers of transported products, deserve a lot better, a lot cheaper than they have provided.

You will almost certainly have heard of Energy Minister Dipuo Peters’s call for an investigation into the possibility of reducing the speed limits as one of the ways of increasing fuel efficiency. To respond to this proposal, let’s start with a brief trip back in time to 1979. The general speed limit was slashed to 90km/h and a draconian regime was installed regarding the pumping of fuel after hours and over weekends. (It was R5 just to pump a single drop, before you’d paid for your fuel.)

photo credit: Melinda Bylow

To those who didn’t live through that era, this may seem like it was a storm in a tea cup, but the price of petrol in 1979 was about 40c / litre, and R5 bought you quarter of a tank. Just to further emphasise the value of R5 back then, you could have bought 1000 Chappies (at half a cent each) with your R5 note. Nowadays the equivalent coin buys you 10. I recall the futility of wheedling the local pump attendant not to charge me the R5 because I just needed to buy a litre of petrol for my aunt’s lawnmower. No chance!

There is no doubt that these measures reduced the national fuel consumption, but they did so mainly by preventing people from buying fuel rather than reducing average fuel consumption significantly, because I don’t recall anyone paying too much attention to the 90 limit. The fact was that South Africa needed to cut its fuel use  because the country was the pariah of the world and under an oil embargo.

Conservation

However, that excuse no longer holds water, so do not be duped by people who attempt to draw comparisons with the 1970s. South Africa can produce and import as much fuel as it wants nowadays. We use less than 1% of the world’s daily output of crude oil, so there would have to be a catastrophic worldwide production collapse  literally overnight to place us back in the fuel squeeze of 1979. Obviously from an environmental and long-term conservation point of view there is an argument to use less oil, but it will be a while still before production constraints force that reality upon the world. So we’re left with the cost issue. And who could believe that the government wants to reduce speed limits because it cares about us motorists and wants to save us money? (This is the same government that wants Gauteng motorists to pay 66c/km in tolls, remember, which is almost the equivalent of doubling the fuel price.)

Besides, it is highly debatable whether reducing the speed limit actually reduces fuel consumption to any great degree. A car is at its optimal efficiency in any gear at approximately its torque peak. It is no coincidence that the torque peaks of many cars coincide with freeway cruising speeds of 120 – 140km/h, to accommodate those general speed limits world-wide. If speed limits are reduced, it’s arguable that modern cars will show increased average fuel consumption, because they will spend more time driving around on the back side of their torque curves. That means the engine is not operating in its optimal speed range for efficiency, which means more acceleration is required, and more gear changes too, pushing up consumption. Ironically this is most noticeable in small-engined cars which are often driven by people who are hit the hardest by fuel price rises.

Indeed, one’s average fuel consumption in round-town driving at the urban speed limit of 60km/h is often double that obtained in freeway driving at 120, for the simple reason that urban driving requires many changes in speed, and that is the main cause of increased fuel consumption. The most efficient trade-off between speed and economy is to maintain a constant speed, in the highest gear possible, as close to the vehicle’s torque peak as you can. Reducing speed limits below typical freeway cruising speeds will not really aid this cause.

Wasted

More fuel is wasted by people who accelerate in town when they don’t need to than by people who drive at 120 instead of 100, and I can demonstrate this practically to anyone who cares to watch. In fact, in a previous car of mine, I proved that it’s easily possible to obtain a 38% reduction in fuel consumption over the vehicle’s factory-stated fuel consumption, and I did so with four people in the car without resorting to any bizarre “hypermiling” tactics like pumping the tyres to three bars or limiting my top speed to 50km/h. No, I did it with the same combination of planning, anticipation and smoothness that my company teaches to defensive driving trainees every day. We have clients who recover the cost of training every nine months through fuel savings alone thanks to their employees using these very same techniques. If Minister Peters wants people to use less fuel, for whatever reason, the simplest method would be to advise the Minister of Transport to overhaul the licensing system so that people learn techniques of safety and economy right at the start when they get their licences.

Actually, the Department of Energy is the very last agency which should be talking about making it the driver’s responsibility to save fuel. If the DoE was doing its job, it would already have fast-tracked upgraded refineries and fuel standards so that South African fuels can be used in Euro V engines which are more efficient and less polluting. It would also be insisting that the CO2 tax collected on the purchase price of new cars be used solely for environmental purposes, rather than going into general revenue where it might end up paying for anything from budget vote parties to SAPS overtime. Oh, and it might also be supplying fuel sales data to the RTMC so that the government can issue a fatalities / 100m km figure for the first time in 5 years.

The bottom line is that Peters’s utterances are nothing more than election-time antics from a Minister of an under-performing department. There is no evidence that speed limit reductions will improve road safety or significantly reduce fuel consumption and Peters should confine herself to the urgent tasks that require her attention rather than adding clutter to the national discourse.

Photo credit: Microstock Photography

South Africa has an ambitious target to halve road deaths by 2014. Unfortunately, since that target was set in 2009, road deaths have increased and so, I suspect, has the fatality rate. The USA has set a fine example of how this could be reversed in South Africa if there were the political will.

The first thing we should do is stop lying to our population about the carnage on our roads. Every year after Christmas the government comes up with the same old lies about how road deaths are down when it’s clear for all to see that they’re up. I get very nervous about governments that try to hide or deny information that is public knowledge, and the DoT’s stubborn refusal to face facts reminds me of the old USSR, where reality was routinely adjusted to accommodate the Politburo’s opinion.

Deceit

So for heaven’s sake, let’s just make a clean breast of it. There is no good reason for this continued deceit and that is one of the things the USA has realised when it comes to road deaths – if you want to reduce them, measure road safety properly and be honest about the situation.

The next aspect is the importance of quality data. When you’ve got good data and you interpret it properly, you learn things about what you’re studying. The USA does extremely well on this front and has been doing so for decades. In all the years I have been following road safety data and statistics, I have never heard of a large-scale scandal which has brought the integrity of the USA’s road safety data into question.

Not only does the USA have good data, but when there is a noteworthy crash, the National Transportation Safety Board invests tireless resources in getting to the bottom of it and ensuring someone is held accountable. South Africa could take a leaf from this book. For instance, when last (if ever) was the MD of a bus company actually held criminally accountable for a bus crash where negligence or poor maintenance was the cause? The law makes provision for this, so why isn’t it happening? Where is the justice for all those dead crash victims the Department of Transport says are each “one too many”? Bus crashes in the USA, on the other hand, are reported almost as sensationally as presidential elections, and your reward for running a shabby bus operation in that country will quite likely be a stripey uniform and an extended stay in a sparsely-furnished room finished in ‘hint of concrete’.

Successful

But even good data, lovingly collected and painstakingly massaged into sensible policy, must still be given effect out on the road. From the driver’s point of view, the USA driver education system is an immutable monolith from which you will not emerge successful if you don’t have the right skills. And if you commit a serious traffic offence, you might end up back there to re-do your licence, assuming they don’t think you’re such a liability to other road users that they hand you a lifetime driving ban. The points demerit system has been running in the USA since 1959, long before there were computers to do all the legwork. Meanwhile, in the Information Age in SA, the AARTO Act (first mooted in 1993) is unlikely to be fully implemented before the world ends in December 2012.

The USA driver is thus better researched, better trained and better policed by their government than almost any other driver on earth, and that’s what road safety is all about. It’s about actually being serious about meeting targets and requiring a certain standard of driver behaviour. After all, there is very little by the way of infrastructure or engineering that accounts for the USA fatality rate dropping by one-third in the past five years or so. The USA’s roads aren’t substantially better now than they were in 2005, or even 1960 for that matter, and they have an almost unique problem with the tens of thousands of railway crossings which are a highly hazardous feature of their road system. Vehicle safety too is starting to plateau – there is a limit to the amount of crashworthiness that can be built into a 5m X 2m X 1m steel box and cars are not substantially safer now than they were five years ago, although there was a vast improvement in the preceding two decades.

Control

No, the USA’s road safety improvements are coming from its willingness to control, down to a very fine degree, what its drivers get up to on the roads. They insist that drivers are properly educated, drive roadworthy vehicles and that they adapt judiciously to the prevailing conditions. When they stop doing these things, they get nailed by the authorities, and they get nailed for all sorts of offences, not just the ones that turn a profit.

Our own DoT should learn from this. Perhaps they should start from the reality that even in 1998, the year in which SA had the lowest fatality rate ever, we still killed 9068 people on our roads. The current fatality rate is double what it was then, and the death toll, at the time the announcement about halving roads deaths by 2014 was made, was over 15000. It’s hopelessly dreamy to think that we could cut that to 7500 by 2014 when all the evidence points to the fact that our roads are currently the most anarchic they have been in the past 45 years and the fatality rate is almost certainly no lower than it was in the mid-1960s. I suggest we start by setting modest, achievable targets and actually meeting them for a few years running before raising our sights to more ambitious levels. This is what the USA has done – every year they have made minute, incremental gains which are starting to add up to something really spectacular.

The 2014 target was set out of political desperation to not appear foolish at the Moscow Ministerial Conference a couple of years ago, but it was and is fundamentally unrealistic. Right now our focus should be on eliminating the systemic failures which impede us from obtaining any reduction at all in road deaths, much less cutting them by half. Our DoT could certainly do worse than taking a lead from how things are done in Washington DC, and the US government deserves congratulations for its continued leadership in making road use safer.

How many cars per kilometre?

It’s unrealistic to always expect politicians and their close associates to understand the portfolios they are appointed to, but unfortunately it seems that a lot of people in the DoT are extremely scared of the Minister of Transport. This results in public statements which reflect policy rather than reality. A good example of this is the Christmas road death toll: the Minister of Transport has committed that road deaths will be halved by 2014, and so his minions apparently felt duty-bound to report that the death toll for Christmas 2010/2011 was down, even though correct analysis of the government’s own figures shows that it’s up. This is nothing new – the DoT has been doing it for several years, but it highlights the dangers of allowing political imperatives to override or eliminate the technical expertise of state apparatus.

Against this background, it is unsurprising that Vundla would say an increase in vehicle population poses a “peculiar danger”. (It sounds plausible, so who cares whether it’s right?) A superficial guided tour of the real facts regarding vehicle densities will demonstrate not only how inaccurate it is, but how easily he could have researched the subject.

Study

According to a 2008 AA study, the total length of South Africa’s roads is approximately 600 000km. The number of vehicles on our roads, as reported by E-Natis, was 9.91 million vehicles as at the end of February 2011. This equates to approximately 16.5 cars per kilometre of road, or 60 metres per vehicle, if you prefer.

The UK Institute of Advanced Motorists, on the other hand, reports that Britain has 412 933 km of roads, but a staggering total of 28.67 million vehicles. This means they have 69.5 cars per kilometre of road, or 14 metres per vehicle. In other words, the population density of cars in the UK is four and a quarter times higher than that of South Africa. Not only that, but the roads that the UK’s cars travel on are packed into a far smaller country than those of South Africa, meaning that it’s easier for congestion on one part of the road network to affect another, and that there is a shorter average distance between intersections, with all the accompanying potential for danger.

According to Wikipedia, the United Kingdom has a surface area of 243 610 km2, almost exactly one-fifth of South Africa’s 1 221 037km2. This means that in the UK, there are 118 cars per square km, compared to SA’s 8 cars per square km. Not only does each South African vehicle have much more road to travel on, it’s also much less likely to come across another vehicle. Just to illustrate the difference: South Africa would need to have a vehicle population of 144 million to attain the UK’s traffic density by area, or approximately 42 million to be equivalent by road space.

Dangerous

So, returning to Vundla’s statements about how increasing vehicle population poses additional danger, let’s summarise by saying that if one looks at vehicle populations and traffic densities, the United Kingdom would appear to be at a severe disadvantage to South Africa and it would be natural to assume that it would be far more dangerous to drive in the UK.

Wrong! We know the SA government hasn’t released a fatalities / 100 million figure since 2006, so we’ll use the one from that year, 12.02, although it’s probably considerably higher by now. The UK government, does, however, keep its fatality rates up to date, and it currently averages about 0.8 fatalities / 100 million km. In other words, despite the fact that traffic densities in the UK are five times higher (by road length) and 15 times higher (by land area), you’re about 15 times less likely to be killed driving there than in South Africa.

That doesn’t even begin to take account of some of the other hazards one faces on the UK’s roads – the frequent rain, for example and poor visibility due to the generally inclement weather. One might also consider England’s topography, which is far less conducive to long, straight sections of road with good visibility such as are commonplace in South Africa. And what about things that the average South African driver will rarely experience in their lifetimes, like black ice, snow, sleet, and whiteout conditions? These are commonplace for the British driver.

Risk

The aforegoing discussion is a good illustration of why it is so important that South Africa should release up-to-date fatalities / 100 million km figures. This measure is a means of comparing road safety after all the issues touched on above have been taken into consideration. It’s an overall expression of risk, which is it is used by, among others, the USA and the United Kingdom as their headline measure of road safety – it’s a way of saying: “After every single factor related to driver, road, environment, weather and vehicle is taken into account, one’s risk of death is X.” There is no evidence I’ve seen that heavier traffic densities increase these fatality rates. Indeed, the countries world-wide with the highest traffic densities are generally those with the best road safety records.

Co-incidentally, in the same speech in which Vundla made his comments about traffic densities, he bemoaned the lack of accurate road safety data. How odd! In May 2008 I warned the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Transport of exactly that problem. Three years later, the problem is still evident. Besides, Vundla’s statements show no evidence of him having researched the available statistics, so one must ask what he wants them for.

Indeed, at the risk of belabouring the point by referring to yet more statistics, South Africa’s vehicle population is five times higher now than it was in 1970, but our current fatality rate is still exactly the same as it was then. I can think of no stronger evidence to show Vundla that traffic density is the least of South Africa’s problems and it behoves him to take more care before making public statements that can so easily be shown to be incorrect.

During a recent experience driving in the rain at night, I was reminded of how little regard people have for the influence of wet roads on their ability to brake and swerve safely.

Rain, rain, go away!

Many people claim that South Africans forget how to drive in the wet, but that’s incorrect. The real problem is that South Africans, when confronted with wet weather, continue to drive as if it were still dry. The two biggest pile-ups in South African history, which took place in consecutive years (1992 and 1993) at the same spot on the M1 in Midrand and involved 65 and 66 cars respectively, both happened in wet weather. Both crashes were attributable to a sudden change in traffic speed, occasioned in the first year by a spinning car and the second by a jack-knifed truck. The cars behind were doubtless following at the average South African following distance of around a quarter to a half a second, meaning that even those drivers who happened to be looking further ahead than the end of their bonnet simply had no braking or swerving space available to them and ploughed into the carnage.

Negligible

The attitude of many South African drivers is that they refuse to keep a following distance because then “people cut in front of them”. Of course, there’s no truth to this, it’s just one of those myths about driving that circulates endlessly. The truth is that every single comparative study between cars that keep a following distance and cars that don’t has returned the same conclusion: keeping a correct following distance has a negligible affect on arrival time. Neither does lane-hopping through traffic or attempting to use all one’s available traction while negotiating bends, but that rarely seems to deter the really hardened types who can’t resist doing their racing on public roads.

The scene was this: a lit freeway, four lanes wide, a speed limit of 120 but with rain sufficient to render 85km/h a safe speed, and this was the speed that the general flow of traffic was adhering to. In the left lane was a large truck travelling even slower, probably 45km/h or so, and I was in the next lane about 200 metres back, having pulled out to pass him. There was a car ahead of me in my lane, probably about 50 metres ahead of the truck, and also one in the lane to his right and slightly ahead. The right-hand lane was clear. And so, in this solid downpour on a waterlogged road, we all plodded along within a few km/h of each-other with plenty of margin for error. Until two idiots, in a Ford Fiesta and a Golf GTI respectively, managed to endanger every single one of us in their near-miss.

Wreckage

Both approached from behind at a speed I estimated to be no less than 140km/h. They then diverged, and idiot #1 in his GTI took to the left-hand lane, while idiot #2 continued in the lane next to mine. That was my cue to suck in my breath through my teeth because I had just passed a huge patch of standing water in the left-hand lane and I knew that if #1 hit it, lost control and spun to the right, he was going to take me out and probably push my wreckage into the path of #2. As it happened he got through it, zoomed past me, and didn’t see the truck ahead of him. For a moment I thought he was going to smash right into it, but then he cut across three lanes, narrowly missing the truck and the first car ahead.

Of course, he’d forgotten about idiot #2, who had to dive into the fast lane and stand on the brakes to avoid being taken out while #1 swerved left round the second car ahead, missing it by no more than a few feet. Undeterred, they both then vanished up the road at an even higher rate than that at which they had arrived.

There are two problems at play. The first is total, wanton disrespect for the law, which is a consequence of the traffic authorities ignoring all offences except exceeding the speed limit. I mean, technically these guys were probably only 20km/h over the speed limit, so they’d get a R250 fine and one AARTO demerit point, and that’s probably all the cops would be looking to nail them for. Big deal. But between them they committed no fewer than eight or ten life-threatening reckless manoeuvres, any one of which should have seen them locked up. I don’t know what it will take to make the traffic cops understand that if they enforce moving violations mercilessly, offence rates of all other types will drop in sympathy, but I’ve explained it to death in the past and shan’t do so again today.

War stories

The second problem is that we have too many drivers who hide their ignorance behind a façade of bravado. The type is familiar to me through many years running track and skidpan training sessions: bluff, swaggering yobbos with well-embellished “there-I-was-at-a-comfortable-240km/h” war stories. Ironically, they are often the first to freeze in panic when their car gets half sideways or they get put in the passenger seat and driven round a racetrack as a passenger.

Despite this, they commonly drive like morons on public roads, unaware that they are on the ragged edge of wiping out numerous people in a single go. It’s also striking how such a driving style persists long into middle age for many drivers, and occasionally beyond. I’m not sure how one communicates sense to these people and perhaps it’s a case of that favourite saying of a past boss of mine: “the problem with common sense is that it’s not common.” So, if you silently curse when someone flies past you at twice the actual safe speed in wet weather conditions, take heart that you’re not alone.

Over the years I have repeatedly called for the driving licence test to be revised, and last week, a reader sent me an e-mail asking what I’d like to see in a new test. Let me start by saying what I would remove from the test. The first thing would be the emergency stop, which is redundant skill in an era of electronic driver assistance, and the second is the yard test.

Photo credit: captainbeaky

The yard test is a pointless formality that adds nothing to road safety. If that statement seems irretractably definitive, consider two facts. Firstly, the yard test may take no longer than 20 minutes, while the road test should be a minimum of 20 minutes. In the real world, this is more or less how the average test pans out, meaning that roughly half of the entire test duration is spent in the yard. Secondly, in 1998, the last year for which figures for all fatality types were available, the number of fatalities which took place in reverse gear was a total of 16 out of 9068 for the year, or two-tenths of a percent. Does it not strike you as bizarre that fully half of the test duration is spent on driving practices responsible for a mere 0.2% of fatalities? The 18 – 24 year-old age group’s dire fatality rate is directly descended from this structural problem which sees too much time being spent on issues which cause so few fatalities that they aren’t even listed as a separate category in the RTMC’s annual stats roundup any more.

I propose that we replace the yard test with a letter from a certified driving instructor in good standing with a reputable organisation like the South African Institute of Driving Instructors. The letter should state that the instructor has trained the candidate and considers them competent in basic parking manoeuvres and moving off against an incline. I would then make the minimum road test duration 40 minutes. Apart from improving the quality of the test, this would free up the land currently being used for yards for redevelopment or sale by the municipalities that own it.

OBE

Having axed the yard test, I’d then begin to implement an Outcomes-Based Education curriculum for the practical road test. OBE is a dismal failure for academic purposes, because it presumes that the outcome will (a) always take place and (b) always be predictable. However, OBE is a perfect model for driving instruction, because good driving consists of specific measurable outcomes with very little leeway for argument or discussion. You either are following at a sufficient distance to avoid a crash or you aren’t. You either are looking far enough ahead to allow for good awareness or you aren’t. There are precious few grey areas in driving, and dozens of measurable outcomes.

Right now, the driving licence is too caught up with systematising the process by which outcomes are to be attained, rather than ensuring the actual outcomes are met. If the outcome is that I want to join a freeway safely, who cares whether I checked my blind spot once, twice, ten times, or not at all? What matters is that I recognised that I was entering a phase of driving where another vehicle in my blind spot could be a hazard and I reacted accordingly. I’d rather sit next to a candidate who analyses a situation intelligently and concludes that no blind spot check is necessary in that particular case, than next to someone who swivels their head by rote without actually looking.

With that philosophy as a point of departure, I’d then compile a list of the top 50 hazards a driver faces and base the driving licence curriculum on those situations. It would be expected of an applicant that they would know the correct reaction to all of those situations, because it’s exactly such knowledge that’s lacking in the current test. For instance, when a K53 licence candidate goes through a green traffic light, he’s thinking about mirror checks and speed control. Those things are important, but what about escape routes, the possibility of cross-traffic skipping the red light, the potential danger of a car waiting to turn across his path, and the quality of road surface for braking and swerving?

Experience

The current approach to driver tuition and the licence test is that drivers are taught a system which has been out of date for at least 30 years, given a few hints, and expected to go off and find out the rest of the knowledge themselves and fit it into the system. The claim has been made that the system will help drivers deal with novel or unique driving situations, but that’s not true at all – the precursor to coping with such a situation is recognising the danger. New drivers don’t have the knowledge to do that and my proposal addresses exactly this deficiency. The licensing system should give drivers the knowledge, contextualise its use, and encourage them to systematise it however they wish by constantly asking the simple question: “What danger do I currently face and how can I reduce it?”

If that sounds suspiciously like defensive driving, it’s because it is. Why should we wait until after licence level to teach people what they need to know to survive? It makes it twice as difficult if one waits till later, because companies like mine then have to spend as much time trying to break old, bad habits as trying to instill new, good ones. Why not teach defensive driving at licence level? Why should we accept that the correct way to teach an 18 year-old to drive is to hammer a system consisting of a dozen points into their heads and tell them that if they don’t use it they’ll fail? It’s almost as if the system takes pride in requiring the examiners to be latter-day trolls, lurking ever near to pounce on a missed ‘observe’.

We need a curriculum which creates life-long safe driving habits, based on good judgment and actual driving knowledge and skill. This would be a considerable improvement on the current command/response regime which wears the cloak of road safety but is disconcertingly similar to puppy training.

The Joburg Metro Police Department has issued, and continues to issue, thousands of invalid traffic fines. Director Gerrie Gerneke’s attitude is they must still be paid to avoid motorists being “inconvenienced at roadblocks”. The latter is a euphemism for “illegally arrested and jailed”.

Photo credit: Rosanne Bane

The cause of the trouble is section 30 of the AARTO Act which states that all camera infringement notices must be served on the infringer by registered post. Since one doesn’t collect a registered item from the Post Office by accident, the use of registered post to deliver camera fines is an elegant way of making sure people don’t weasel out of fines by claiming they didn’t get them, made more elegant still by the proviso that proceedings may continue against you if you don’t collect the registered item within ten days.

However, it also means that if a fine arrives directly in your post box, it’s automatically invalid. If any further AARTO processes are subsequently taken against you in respect of that fine, like attachment of assets, they are illegal. You also cannot be arrested at a roadblock for not paying the fine. The only times you can be arrested for a traffic violation are when you commit a serious traffic offence and are directly apprehended by an officer at the scene of your folly, or when you have been summonsed under the Criminal Procedure Act to appear in court to answer a charge arising from an traffic violation and you fail to appear, resulting in a warrant for your arrest being issued.

Sheriff

You cannot, under any circumstances, be arrested for failing to pay a fine stemming from an AARTO infringement, valid or otherwise. The worst that can happen is that the sheriff may attach your assets to the value of the outstanding fine plus costs and that won’t happen if the fine was invalid to begin with. Do not be taken in by Gerneke’s claims that JMPD is applying to have the law changed to legalise the department’s issuing of AARTO notices by standard surface mail – no such step has been taken and no such proposed amendment has been issued by the Department of Transport for comment. Section 30 of the AARTO Act stands as it is written and the JMPD (and the RTMC’s AARTO unit) are committing an offence every time they send out a notice by standard surface mail.

So when Gerneke says that motorists may be “inconvenienced at roadblocks” (ie. arrested) for not paying an AARTO infringement notice that was illegally issued, he is manufacturing law as it suits him, a privilege which not even Parliament enjoys! You cannot be arrested at a roadblock except when a warrant for your arrest exists or you have committed an arrestable offence at the roadblock itself. Any other arrest is illegal and if it happens to you, you should sue. Indeed, not three weeks ago, Judge Billy Mothle of the North Gauteng High Court awarded R50 000 in damages to the victim of an unlawful arrest and issued a harsh rebuke against the police for the skyrocketing number of unlawful arrests. He emphasised that people should only be arrested and detained for just cause.

Getting right back to the point though, since where were roadblocks supposed to be ‘convenient’ anyway? Their function is to catch criminals, not provide roadside entertainment. According to the latest NIMMS stats, almost 59% of drivers killed in traffic crashes are under the influence of alcohol. I find it personally very inconvenient that I have to share the roads with such people and it annoys me that the JMPD is so concerned with people paying its illegal fines, yet so indifferent towards drunk drivers. Research the JMPD arrest rates for drunk driving some time – they are abysmal.

Masquerading

I can’t imagine that a law-abiding driver would have a problem with the convenience or otherwise of a roadblock. Why should they have anything to fear if their car is roadworthy, they are properly licensed and they drive in accordance with the law? If the cost of safer roads is that I have to sacrifice five minutes of arrival time, I’m all for it. But when ‘inconvenience’ is a euphemism for ‘illegal arrest’ and the roadblock is actually a revenue collection operation masquerading as road safety, I am having my time wasted for no good reason and I’m being inconvenienced whether they cuff me or not.

The JMPD’s disregard for the law is based on an admittedly good understanding of human psychology: most people, when they receive a fine, will automatically assume that justice is being served in a fair and even-handed way. The thought doesn’t enter their minds that the enforcers could be the real criminals, and in most cases citizens don’t have the knowledge to tell a legal fine from an illegal one. The JMPD (and also the RTMC’s AARTO unit) are operating in flagrant violation of the law by issuing infringement notices in contravention of Section 30, and they demonstrate their contempt by knowingly continuing to issue them several months after the fact was first reported in the media.

Courtesy

More to the point, even if the JMPD drags out another of their stock arguments and claim that the notices are just a courtesy prior to the actual issue of an AARTO infringement notice and there is no breach of Section 30, the courts have held over and over that if something looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it IS a duck. If you hold up a bank with a realistic-looking toy gun, you’re going to jail for as long as if it was a real one. If the ‘courtesy notices’ are so realistic that they are indistinguishable from the real thing – and if the JMPD accepts payment of fines based on them – then I can’t see how they are not in breach of section 30 of the Act. The average consumer wouldn’t reasonably be expected to know the difference between a real infringement notice and the JMPD’s straight-to-your-postbox jobbies, and the fact is that the two are identical. I would love to see the JMPD try and present the ‘courtesy notice’ argument before a magistrate…

I therefore advise everyone who has received an infringement notice by standard surface mail to urgently read the webpage http://www.aarto.co.za/ssm.asp and pass it around to all who may be affected – you may be entitled to have your fine refunded to you if the notice on which it was based was invalid. South Africa’s drivers need to take a stand against officials who don’t see the irony in enforcing the law by breaking it.

The only motoring story of prominence in the past week has been that of SANRAL’s new tolls. Coverage has saturated the news and we bring you a roundup of some of the week’s most important developments on the Gauteng Freeway Improvement Project tolls.

Afriforum’s Kriel slams VAT on toll fees

Photo credit: RandomAlex

According to Kallie Kriel, CEO of AfriForum, the levying of VAT on toll fees in effect means that motorists will be taxed fivefold. “Apart from income tax, fuel levies, vehicle licences and the toll fees that motorists will have to pay, they are also being expected to pay VAT on these toll fees,” Kriel said.

In light of the fact that the new Gauteng Highway Improvement Project is being financed by means of external loans, and that not a cent from the state coffers will be used for it, he said it was “totally inappropriate” for the State to use VAT on toll fees as a source of revenue on top of that.

SACP jumps on the bandwagon

In a widely-reported statement, the South African Communist Party criticised Gauteng’s new tolling system, saying it will raise prices of basic commodities and public transport.

“This will negatively affect working class communities and the poor, considering that they mostly use public transport,” the party’s Gauteng secretary, Jacob Mamabolo, was quoted as saying.

“Of major concern to us is the poor consultation processes leading to this new system. This has left a lot of questions unanswered as some stake-holders were not taken on board.”

Cosatu calls for toll road review

Cosatu spokesperson, Patrick Craven, said that the tolling plan was ill-considered and would disrupt Gauteng’s economy.

Craven said the hardest hit will be workers – many of whom have no alternative but to use tolled roads.

Meanwhile, the Minister of Transport proved himself remote from the realities of transport in Gauteng:

“If you don’t like the price of a toll road, hop on a taxi, a bus or a train instead,” he said.

In an apparent response to public outrage at proposed toll fees in Gauteng, Ndebele said in Cape Town yesterday that residents of Africa’s economic engine had a choice of transport modes and therefore could not complain about the price of tolls.

“It is not as if people in that province don’t have a choice… You are no longer forced to take your car and take the back roads (to avoid toll roads)… There is a very clear choice that the whole continent of Africa does not have.”

Later that day, the following news broke:

The owner of a building in Centurion that was obscured by a new toll gantry has won a high court order ruling that the declaration of a section of the N1 as a toll road was irregular and should be set aside

Judge Bert Bam also found the SA National Roads Agency Limited (Sanral) had failed to comply with the National Environmental Management Act (Nema). Bam added that Sanral was obliged to consider the provisions of Nema regarding the impact of the toll gantry on the environment.

Sanral said Nema was not applicable to toll gates, but Bam said: “Sanral’s failure in this regard is clearly a non-compliance with a material issue and requirement of natural justice, which amounts to an irregularity.”

Cosatu plans toll road strike

The Congress of SA Trade Unions in Gauteng is planning a strike and stayaway over the imminent introduction of additional toll fees in the province..

“The provincial executive committee (PEC) has resolved to fight tooth and nail this system called toll gates,” said provincial secretary Dumisani Dakile at a media briefing. Dakile announced a “programme of action” to deal with the e-toll system, to be implemented later this year

CEO of SANRAL, Nazir Alli, meanwhile defended the fact that 30% of the toll costs go towards collecting the tolls!

Speaking at a National Press Club conference in Pretoria, Alli said the country was seeking foreign direct investment, but at the same time there would be an outcry if a foreign company was given work.

“We need to make up our minds. Are we going to say we don’t want foreign investment?” he asked. ETC Joint Venture won the R6.22bn tender to operate the controversial toll system.

Alli said he believed that the tolls would have a minimum impact on inflation.

The ANC then decided that the tolls are a bad idea.

The ANC’s Gauteng provincial leaders have said they would meet their national counterparts to discuss the toll system and its impact.

Ntuli said the PEC had expressed “grave concern” about the economic and social impact of the tolling plan on Gauteng residents. It had said a “tangible” and “better high level transport system” was needed in the province and this required “significant planning”.

“We need to cushion the impact in the short term and provide a lasting solution in the long term. Everyone must be able to use public transport.”

S’bu Ndebele flip-flops after realising that signing off the tariffs was indeed a Very Bad Idea

“The bill is there. We must find a way to pay the debt so that it doesn’t bite too hard on workers and non-working people and taxi operators, otherwise it’s self-defeating,” Ndebele told journalists, ahead of his meeting with Gauteng premier Nomvula Mokonyane to discuss the controversial road tolling system due to be introduced in the province in June.

“If it’s so hard that people are left bankrupt because of a good road, then it becomes self-defeating.”

And finally, the tolls were put ‘on hold’ pending a ‘consultation process’

This was essentially an admission of guilt that the consultation process prior to the commencement of construction was inadequate. Numerous people and organisations have pointed out that not enough research has been done into the economic impacts and affordability of the tolls.

Anyone wishing to mount a court challenge to the whole tolling system probably has an excellent chance of success, since the Minister of Transport clearly did not have adequate facts at his disposal when he approved both the proclamation of the freeways as toll roads and the toll tariffs themselves.