From the category archives:

Motoring

Side impacts: few second chances

Rob Handfield-Jones February 10, 2011 Motoring

Ouch!
There’s one crash type, above all others, that I live in deep fear of, and that’s a side impact. Knowing the data as I do, I can share with you that your death risk from a side impact is astronomical. For every three side crashes, one person is killed. Compare that to a bumper-bashing, where [...]

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The reign of bureaucratic sloth

Rob Handfield-Jones February 2, 2011 Motoring

At the beginning of October 2009, I wrote the following piece. At the time I re-read it, thought it was weak, and shelved it. But having been recently reminded of the issue by a colleague, I scratched around until I found the piece. I also discovered the notes that I made when researching the story, [...]

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RTMC man’s radio chaos

Rob Handfield-Jones January 27, 2011 Motoring

The RTMC’s Ashref Ismail recently appeared on KZN’s Lotus FM to discuss road safety. I was invited to reply on air to some of the statements he made, and since many of his comments were so startling, I thought it might be instructive to compile a potted summary of what he said, and the gist [...]

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The DoT’s trillion Rand failure

Rob Handfield-Jones January 19, 2011 Motoring

The revelation that the Department of Transport has again lied about the road death situation does not really come as a surprise. The surprise is that the public accepts the DoT’s nonsense so meekly, without any real hint of outrage.

Photo credit: jenineabarbanel
One of the reasons, I suppose, is that the whole issue of Christmas stats [...]

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Keeping the BS flowing

Rob Handfield-Jones January 12, 2011 Motoring

Early last year I wrote that the SABMiller “Drink and Drive and you WILL get caught” campaign was well-meaning, but untrue, and that drink / drive prosecutions are so infrequent that they barely make a blip in the estimated 50% of drivers who drive under the influence of alcohol every day. Indeed, according to the [...]

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Goals needed for road safety activism

Rob Handfield-Jones December 8, 2010 Motoring

My final column for 2010 has vague echoes from a piece I wrote in 2001, so perhaps a short recap of that article is in order. It was a time when the R55 from behind Kyalami to Fourways past Leeuwkop Prison was a potholed single-lane deathtrap. One of its less endearing features was a sweeping [...]

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Who are the problem drivers?

Rob Handfield-Jones November 24, 2010 Motoring

Give any discussion of driving more than two minutes to develop and there is one certainty beyond even that of the sun rising in the morning: someone (almost always a car driver) will claim that if only the police clamped down on taxi drivers, all road safety problems would be solved.
It is a statement as [...]

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Licence hard to lose

The Administrator November 17, 2010 Motoring

A couple of trade unions have muttered about AARTO over the past few months. Unfortunately their remarks did little than to prove that they know precious little about road safety, and even less about AARTO. So what I basically want to say to Satawu in particular, they being the agitators-in-chief, is that they can sing, [...]

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Facts play second fiddle in road safety PR

Rob Handfield-Jones November 10, 2010 Motoring

It’s well-known that there are numerous problems with South Africa’s road safety data – the Medical Research Council / UNISA mortuary returns surveys suggest that that real fatality rate might be 50% – 80% higher than the official figure. The main reason for this is administrative failings at local police station level, where data on [...]

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Speedometer: the most pointless instrument

Rob Handfield-Jones November 3, 2010 Motoring

Late in 1999, the first edition of what became Crumple Zone appeared weekly in the Midrand Reporter. It grew to feature in 22 of the Caxton Community Newspapers by 2002, and then became a staple of the back page of AutoDealer for several years before moving to an online format. Today the column celebrates its [...]

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