Michelle Pietersen
6 July 2009
A staggering 12 348 people have died in car crashes on the Western Cape's roads from 2001 to 2008.
Car crashes have, on average, claimed four lives a day - or 1 544 a year - over the past eight years.
And the weekend saw more deaths. Four people were killed when the BMW they were travelling in rammed into a truck on the N1 during the early hours of on Sunday morning. There were nine passengers in the BMW.
In a separate incident, a Claremont man and his 17-year-old son were killed when their motorbike collided with a car on Saturday near the Mount Nelson Hotel.
The "endemic" rate of deaths on the province's roads has prompted MEC for Transport and Public Works Robin Carlisle to embark on a campaign to halve the number of fatalities on the province's roads over the next five years.
Statistics from the Road Traffic Management Corporation indicate that the Western Cape has the country's third highest rate of motor accident deaths.
KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng are the only other provinces to have recorded more fatalities in the same eight-year period.
Verified statistics from the Accident Bureau show that over the past few months 17 people have been killed on the N2 - which, over the past eight years, has proved to be the deadliest road.
The statistics excluded most of this year's car crashes as these cases are still being investigated.
The completed figures for 2006 and 2007 paint a grave picture.
In 2007, 4 814 recorded car crashes occurred on the N2, killing 25 people and leaving another 163 seriously injured. And in 2006, there were 4 255 recorded car crashes, leaving 28 people dead and 122 seriously injured.
In just one of the 31 633 car crashes that have occurred on the N2 over the past decade, Mzoli's Restaurant heir Mandisi Ngcawuzele, 28, was killed 10 days ago.
He died when he tried to avoid two pedestrians walking along the N2 opposite the Athlone towers. One of the pedestrians was also killed in the accident.
Speaking to the Cape Argus on Sunday night, Mzoli Ngcawuzele said that although he knew the N2 had claimed many lives, he had never thought the statistics would, one day, include his son.
"We are still feeling very bad. It's still very tough to try and get through what happened," he said.
Mandisi Ngcawuzele was buried at the weekend.
Carlisle said the dire state of the province's roads was the result of a "lack of political will to do something about the problem, until now".
Another major problem, he said, was the lack of "focused law enforcement".
"There has never been an attempt in the province to do what we are doing now," Carlisle said.
He said nobody in (the previous provincial) government had asked the questions being asked now.
"And we must ask them and we must take action to cut down (the number of) deaths on roads."
He said he intended to create a "road safety partnership" with the assistance of various agencies.
Carlisle said he "hoped to speed actions against law breakers" with the introduction of the point system early next year in combination with existing legislation.
Effort would focus on eradicating drunk driving and speeding which "together accounted for 80 percent of deaths on our roads", he said.
The biggest challenge, he said, was to convince road users to "get on board".
Carlisle said the identification of "black spots and times" was essential in the effective placement of law enforcement.
Apart from the N2 other "black spot" roads around the city include the stretch on the N1 between the Koeberg interchange and the Okavango off-ramp in Brackenfell, the N7, the M5, the M3 and the R300.
In 2007, 3 989 car crashes occurred on the N1 with 18 fatalities, and the N7 claimed 19 lives in 2 914 accidents, while on the dangerous R300, 22 people died in 2007 and 21 people were killed in 2006.
The M5 and M3 had the least number of deaths in 2007, with only three on the M5 and four on the M3.
Stan Bezuidenhout, a forensic accident reconstructionist whose company has investigated more than 7 500 accidents, said that travelling on the N2 and N1 at weekends, and between the hours of 10pm and 5am, was particularly hazardous.
"There are a greater number of accidents over weekends since people tend to commute more and over shorter distances" Bezuidenhout said.
"This is also when speeding, illegal racing, drunken driving and other forms of volumetric traffic (long haul taxis and the like) are more active."
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