|
|
South Africa: Can Communication Really Make a Difference to Road Safety?
 |
|
|||||||||
|
||||||||||
Biz-Community (Cape Town)
OPINION
6 May 2008
Posted to the web 6 May 2008
Chris Moerdyk
Once again the end of a long holiday weekend has brought with it a litany of tragedy on our roads. And I wonder about how much of South Africa's appalling road safety record can be attributed to outdated communications and motivational methods. Maybe its time for some road safety marketing paradigms to be shifted to get the death rate down.
Here's an example. For as long as anyone can remember, control of South Africa's motorists has been all stick and very little carrot.
And the reason this country leads just about the whole world when it comes to wiping out fellow citizens on the road at a frightening rate is because even the stick seems to be wielded with such a limp wrist that nowadays that not many drivers wake up in the middle of the night wide-eyed and with thumping hearts at the thought of what might have befallen had they been caught overtaking on a solid white line, shooting a red traffic light and so on.
Frankly, not too many drivers see this as breaking the law anymore or even being mildly delinquent, let alone a criminal offence.
South Africa's road hygiene has deteriorated to the point where a cancer has set in.
Only partially successful
The much vaunted Arrive Alive campaign has only been partially successful when it has been accompanied by threats of dire consequences for speeding and drunken driving. But, even when it has worked, all it has succeeded in doing is reducing road deaths from the absolutely horrific to just plain horrendous. It hardly really dented the problem, though.
Maybe to really reduce the number of accidents on our roads, SA has first to decide if indeed it wants to aspire to the road safety records of Australia, the US, UK and northern Europe.
And if our road traffic authorities and Government are still prepared to have a go at achieving first world targets, then the only way they are going to achieve this is to shift some outdated road safety paradigms.
They are also going to have to attack the cancer with surgery and not Elastoplast.
Most prominent among the causes of our bad road hygiene is the taxi industry. Not from the point of view of causing accidents but because of what it communicates. Strangely enough if one looks at millions of kilometres travelled, combi taxis actually have fewer accidents than the ordinary private motorist. That is the reality. The perception, which is always more powerful than any reality, is that combi taxis are wiping out people faster than any war has ever managed to do.
While taxi drivers the world over exhibit their own peculiar form of arrogance, this is exacerbated in SA simply because it was only recently that the industry was legalised - all we had before that were stone mad bus drivers who now seem to be contesting the title all over again.
Of course, the taxi drivers are not really to blame. They are hounded by their bosses to achieve an almost impossible number of daily journeys in order to make a profit. Anyone under that kind of work pressure would drive like a demon.
Massive competition
Massive competition and out-of-reach profit also means they have to drive badly maintained vehicles.
Now, if that's not bad enough, Government has seen fit to allow the common combi taxi to legally carry far more passenger than the number for which the vehicle was originally designed. Ask any manufacturer and you will be told that combi taxis cannot be strengthened to the point where the passenger load can be anything like doubled.
Logically, therefore, one cannot help but come to the conclusion that Government has been forced to allow taxis to carry a potentially lethal number of passengers in order to be economically viable with the result that a certain number of deaths must be accepted in order to allow the industry to prosper.
Which is frightening. Rather like military chiefs during warfare weighing up the number of casualties relative to attaining a military objective.
|
The big problem, however, is that the more the average motorist sees a taxi driver breaking the rules of the road left, right and centre and getting away with it, and never really being seen to be hauled off the road by a traffic officer, the more the notion of "Well if they can get away with it, then so can I," will take root.
One only has to keep one's eyes open in the traffic to see, not just how many little laws are being broken but how much serious legislation is being ignored.
SA's record of road safety will not start showing significant improvement until Government and the authorities stop applying the law selectively and start applying it to everyone.
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Make allAfrica.com your home page | RSS Feed | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Top | Site Guide | Who We Are | Advertising | Search | Subscribe | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Questions or Comments? Contact us. Read our Privacy Statement. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
