The Road to Safety

2001-2005

Foreword by the Minister

I was privileged to launch the original road safety discussion document Strategy 2000-2004: An End to Carnage on South Africa's Roads 18 months ago, in April 2000. The draft strategy has since gone through a sustained and intensive cycle of public consultation involving the widest possible spectrum of stakeholders and role-players. The major organisations and individual contributors are listed in the Acknowledgements section.

I want to take this opportunity to offer my heartfelt personal thanks to all those who participated in the process. I am greatly encouraged by the breadth and depth of the responses we received – and are still continuing to receive. These responses have demonstrated beyond any doubt that there exists a massive groundswell of informed and imaginative public support for the cause of road safety in South Africa. We have listened and learned. The contributions received have been of great value in helping us to refine and hone the strategy for maximum effectiveness. What we offer here, therefore, is not a Utopian wish list, but a set of carefully balanced and prioritised actions that are practical, affordable and achievable.

I put before you today the final revision of the strategy document, with a new, simpler title in keeping with its practical orientation: The Road to Safety, 2001-2005. This document mandates a set of coordinated actions that we think will begin to lay secure foundations for law compliance, responsibility and mutual respect on South Africa's roads. It focuses on creating systems and structures that work, and enforcement and adjudication measures that will bite.

A New Action Framework

The Road to Safety is driven by the need to find answers to a set of clearly identified interlocking problems across the whole spectrum of road safety and traffic management. The interventions it proposes are derived from an in-depth analysis of our strengths and weaknesses in each of the three critical areas of road safety: the road environment, the road user and the vehicle.

In summary:

• The strategy requires that systematic attention be paid to upgrading road infrastructure and signage on the basis of continuous audits of hazardous locations and crash red-spots.

• It requires that drivers be fit to drive and vehicles fit to use our roads.

It will therefore lead to the introduction of corrective legislative and regulatory measures that will tighten standards and rules in all the most critical areas of safety management.

The Road to Safety will attack incompetence, fraud and corruption head-on in the areas of driver training and licensing, vehicle testing and on-road enforcement. It will overhaul our inspectorates and our regulatory and traffic management institutions, creating new capacities and professional skills to ensure that regulation works and enforcement hits the right targets. By creating a strong institutional platform, the strategy will kick-start the process of taking criminals out of the system and getting dangerous and irresponsible drivers and operators off our roads.

The Road to Safety will strengthen regulation of road-based freight and public transport modes and will encourage (and where necessary legislate for) the implementation of vehicle safety technologies that are proven and appropriate to South African circumstances. It will intensify road safety communication campaigns and will build public-private partnerships and new forms of community participation that will ensure the long-term sustainability of all government-led road safety initiatives.

In the sphere of community participation it will do something further that has never seriously been attempted in South Africa before: it will consciously create mechanisms that protect, empower and give a voice to our most vulnerable road users (especially public transport passengers and pedestrians) so that they at last start to become effective participants in the transport system - architects of their own safety rather than passive victims of the decisions or negligence of others.

A safe, responsive, customer-driven system

In this context, it is important to emphasise that the new road safety strategy is fully aligned with government’s second term commitment to accelerated service delivery and with the overall goals of coherence, cost-effectiveness and customer service spelt out in the 1996 White Paper on Transport and in Moving South Africa–The Action Agenda. The Road to Safety should be seen as a critical element in the creation of an integrated public and private transport system – by road, rail, air and sea - that is responsive, safe and secure, customer-driven and sustainable in the long run.

While we believe that rapid short to medium term gains can be made through the structural and systemic interventions proposed in The Road to Safety, 2001-2005, we are fully aware that the struggle to change basic attitudes and transform South African road user culture will be long and hard. While government will make every effort to facilitate, champion and promote the transformation that is so urgently needed, it cannot win the battle alone. The conscious and responsible participation of all road users, from pre-primary school students upwards, is what is required. This means you and me; your family and mine; our friends, colleagues and acquaintances. Building a road culture of safety, care and compassion means – and can only mean - zero tolerance towards the slightest element of infringement.

I commend The Road to Safety to you. Please join us and commit yourself to helping us realise its goals.

Abdulah M Omar MP
Minister of Transport
November 2001.