Lifesavers or looters? The Christmas 'road safety' myth

So we’re about to do the Christmas-season thing again, and another thousand-plus South Africans who were hale and hearty on December 1 won’t get to see the new year in. Yet again our politicians will pontificate somberly that “speed” and “alcohol” were mostly to blame, ignoring the reality; a large proportion of our drivers are idiots who, because they were incapable of ever passing a driving test, bought their licences from corrupt cops. Our freeways are home to hordes of pedestrians, livestock and informal fruit and veg traders, and our local authorities are more interested in raising revenue from fines than they are in legitimately lowering the accident rate.

Take a look at the photograph below that I took at the top of Durban’s Fields Hill on September 11 this year. See the man holding the baby as he talks to the woman, while they both stand on the freeway in front of the stationary truck? See the 16t sign on the pedestrian bridge behind them? See the speed camera standing on the tripod behind the 16t sign? You can’t see the cop, because the sign hides him, but I watched for 10 minutes and he made no effort to urge the three pedestrians to get out of the road. He was too busy making money for Durban metro. Road safety? Bah — humbug!

And it’s not just municipal cops who think that way. According to the Road Traffic Management Corporation, provincial traffic officers in the six provinces that responded to a survey on operations in December 2005 reported that they had issued 304 298 tickets for speeding and arrested 954 drivers at roadblocks for driving under the influence. The report mentions that for “moving violations such as illegal and unsafe overtaking, driving through red traffic signals and ignoring traffic signs” just 3 330 tickets were issued. Guess where the easy money lies? Govern vehicles to a maximum of 80km/h and ban the sale of alcohol, but as long as these other factors stay in place, our death rate will remain horrendous.

The much-vaunted AARTO (Administrative Adjudication of Road Traffic Offences) Act was supposed to bring our bad drivers into line as far back as 1998. AARTO would free our courts of the burden of handling motoring offences, and errant drivers would accrue demerit points against their driver’s licences, ensuring that habitual offenders ended up joining the other pedestrians on the freeways.

A source within the Department of Transport tells me that one of the reasons AARTO hasn’t yet been implemented after nearly 10 years is that the hundreds of local authorities feathering their nests with money brought in by their traffic departments are reluctant to allow the revenue from traffic fines to be collected by a single national authority. My personal objection to AARTO isn’t based on that, though, but on the belief that all the points system will do is raise the value of the now commonplace bribe. A driver who’s just one point short of losing his licence for six months will happily pay a R1 000 bribe to avoid a R200 fine and, more importantly, that single pesky point.

I don’t know why everybody makes such a fuss over the accident rate over Christmas, when it’s really not much higher in December than it is in March, August or October. Perhaps it’s something to do with the fact that people are generally on holiday and cash-flush, so they willingly pay fines.

The Durban metro last year got into the spirit of things when it trumpeted the fact that it was pushing its speeding fines sky-high over the festive season, and started turning photographs into cash at an alarming rate. The problem was that the greedy swine neglected to discuss their policy with the National Prosecuting Authority, which provides national guidelines on what is fair and reasonable when it comes to imposing traffic fines.

Meetings were held, and Durban found itself in the embarrassing situation of having to offer refunds of hundreds of thousands of rands to those foolish motorists who had simply paid admission-of-guilt fines rather than put up a fight. “Fines” of R1 500 were dropped to R700, and those who had paid R2 500 for doing 95km/h in a 60km/h zone were entitled to a refund of R1 600, according to the Independent on Saturday of January 27.

I emailed Durban metro’s city manager, Herr Doktor Michael Sutcliffe, to ask for his comments on this, but he doesn’t talk to me since I caught him lying about a private jail his cops had illegally built at their headquarters for motorists who naively assumed they were innocent until proven guilty. He didn’t reply, so he obviously still believes that the end justifies the means, and bugger the law. I somehow don’t think his underlings did the right thing and told everybody they fined that they were entitled to a refund, so give them a ring on Tel: 031 306 4422 if you got robbed in Durban over Christmas last year.

Good news for the bike guys, when we peruse the statistics, is that motorcycling in South Africa is relatively safe. According to the Road Traffic Management Corporation, there were 237 566 licensed motorcycles in South Africa in December 2005. Of every 10 000 registered two-wheelers, just 1,53 were involved in accidents that month. For buses the figure was 10,34, minibuses 6,27 and cars 1,41. There were 36 882 learner’s licences issued for two-wheelers in that year, and when you add in the huge number of fully qualified riders trying to crash their brains out each weekend, the death toll of 35 in motorcycle-related accidents for the month of Christmas seems mercifully low. Bear in mind that these are “motorcycle related” deaths, and as almost half of our overall fatalities are pedestrians (482 in that month alone), that must mean that the number of riders and passengers killed was significantly lower.

So there you have it. Even without airbags, safety belts and a cocoon of steel wrapped around us, we motorcyclists aren’t doing a bad job — we’re more competent than most South African car drivers, and do a pretty good job of staying alive, despite our love for speed. All we have to do is get the authorities to accept that a fast driver isn’t necessarily a bad driver, and a fool remains a fool, whether he’s lurching drunkenly across a freeway, driving a minibus taxi with cardboard brake pads, or accepting cash for a piece of paper authorising an incompetent cretin to drive on the road.

This is a mild rehash of a piece originally published in 2Wheels magazine, February 2007