The Road to Safety

2001-2005

Outputs and outcomes

Final outcomes

The final outcomes this strategy seeks to achieve are: reduced road crashes, fatalities and injuries. The conservative targets we are aiming at are those set out in the "strategic objective" defined on p. 20 above: a minimum 5% deduction year-on-year until 2005, followed by a minimum 10% reduction year-on-year until 2009. It must be emphasised that we think these targets are currently set too low. There are two reasons for not immediately setting them higher.

Firstly, so much of what we set out to do in The Road to Safety involves qualitative restructuring of existing management, control and regulatory systems and structures that it is difficult to predict the pace at which the benefits in terms of improved vehicle fitness and driver behaviour will begin to kick in. We are certain that within the lifetime of the strategy our actions to ensure vehicle fitness, eliminate corruption and improve driver standards will have started both to improve overall vehicle safety levels and create a new layer of more safety-aware and skilled entrants to the road network. But it will take much longer to address the backlog of driving incompetence and negative attitudes amongst substantial sections of the older generations of licensed drivers. Licence suspensions, community service sentences and mandatory re-training courses for repeat traffic offenders will have an important demonstration effect, but improvements will not come overnight. So we think we will need three to five years to start getting a better sense of the overall reduction targets that can realistically be set.

Secondly, we are not yet satisfied that our current crash reporting systems and procedures, jointly carried out by the SAPS and provincial, metro and local traffic departments, are producing fully accurate and comprehensive data. We know from experience that both crash coverage and data accuracy levels have increased very considerably, though still unevenly, in tandem with the process of incorporation of the traffic and police departments of the former TVBC states into the new provincial structures, and with general improvements in provincial and local traffic authority procedures. There are still, however, a number of jurisdictions where intensive work remains to be done to get them up to speed. Mandatory use of the new Officer’s Accident Report Form, increasing familiarity with its requirements and better operational cooperation between the SAPS and provincial and local traffic authorities will help to correct these problems.

Our statistical output problem, of course, is that the nearer to 100% crash coverage we get, the "worse" the crash and fatality rates become, as measured against previous years’ (under-reported) statistics. In other words, as we get closer and closer to the goal of 100% reporting across the whole of South Africa, achieved reductions in crash and fatality rates will not reflect as positively as they should in year-on-year terms, because the base coverage is itself becoming more comprehensive each year.

We are, however, confident of reaching a crash coverage target of over 95%, with good quality data, well before 2005. This will stabilise our year-on-year comparative statistics and enable us to set upwardly revised targets with more confidence from 2005 to 2009.

Intermediate and road user group outcomes

These are building blocks towards better final outcomes. They include further work towards setting specific, achievable targets, though we are loath to commit ourselves to definite percentages at this stage.

The intermediate outcomes we are looking for are:

Through Arrive Alive:

• Lower average traffic speeds (urban and rural);

• Further reductions in the proportion of over-the-limit and drug-affected drivers on our roads;

• Increased seatbelt-wearing rates;

• A general increase in adherence to the rules of the road.

Through strategic interventions (The Road to Safety):

• Raised general vehicle fitness standards, as measured by reductions in crashes due to specific causes such as overloading and tyre, steering and braking system failures;

• Arresting (and then beginning to reverse) the decline in the physical condition of the total road network;

The user-group outcomes we are looking for are:

Through strategic interventions (The Road to Safety):

• A greatly increased proportion of drivers with legitimate licences; improved driver skills and attitudes;

• A greatly increased proportion of fully fit, defensively-trained professional drivers;

• An organised, preferably self-regulated, stringently monitored road freight and public passenger transport industry;

• Sharply decreased death and injury rates for public transport passengers, pedestrians and cyclists.

In all these areas a massive amount of work remains to be done. At the same time—and going beyond our current efforts to gather comprehensive and reliable crash data—we need to greatly improve the way we assemble, manipulate and analyse the wider data sets at our disposal on drivers, vehicles, operators, traffic flows and transport movements across South Africa and its borders. These are currently fragmented across a range of agencies whose activities require urgent rationalisation and integration. At the same time, we need to draw on the assistance of our national and international partners to build and centralise more sophisticated capacity for road traffic and transport analysis, and use this to support and standardise local level data gathering activities.

Outputs

We define outputs as legislative, physical, institutional, or system deliverables that will lead towards the realisation of desired intermediate and final outcomes.

Legislative outputs are simply the changes in law and regulations required to give binding effect to policy.

Physical outputs will tend to group together under the headings of infrastructure improvement (road network safety upgrades) and surveillance and enforcement technologies: deployment of breathalysers, speed guns, mobile and static cameras and weigh-in-motion devices, both from budgetary resources and in the framework of public-private sector partnerships (PPPs).

Institutional and system outputs tend to overlap. For example, we are confident that the establishment this year of the Road Traffic Management Corporation (RTMC) will start to provide the required platform for more highly coordinated inter-provincial and provincial-metro-local road traffic management systems.

By enhancing professional development, pooling resources and progressively integrating operational planning across the nine provinces of South Africa, the RTMC will give us a more predictable base for setting intermediate and user-group offence reduction targets that can effectively be met in areas such as speeding, drink/drug driving, seatbelt-wearing and commission of moving violations.

With international assistance, the RTMC will increasingly develop its internal statistical capacity over time, but in the short term there can be no further delay in completing the following activities:

• Full deployment and further development of TRAFMAN and NaTIS;

• Finalisation of more accurate crash reporting procedures and systems, including full review of the current division of responsibility between SAPS and traffic police for crash reporting and investigation and more consistent coordination between SAPS divisions and sections and provincial and local traffic authorities in respect of both routine law enforcement and crash prevention actions;

• Better integration of SAPS and traffic authority statistics and better sharing, analysis and modelling of data between NDoT, SANRAL, CSIR and Statistics South Africa;

• The creation of cooperative mechanisms linking SANRAL, provinces and local authorities that will produce comprehensive road condition audits for the entire urban and rural network.

We have already made a start in most of these areas, but the next critical step will be a concerted effort to assemble a package of accurate projections of the impact of our major safety interventions on South Africa’s economy. Current and projected spending on road safety must be determined by achieved and achievable reductions in road crash and fatality rates and must be aligned with spending to improve the condition of our roads infrastructure. This can then be translated into a full cost-benefit analysis for national treasury that makes a coherent case for increased allocation to road safety, against demonstrable savings on the social and economic costs of road crashes, deaths and injuries. Fiscal division of revenue, the current deployment of fuel levy funds and ring-fencing of provincial and local government revenue from enforcement and adjudication actions must all be revisited. The very large savings to the treasury (some R8.8 billion to date) that have been achieved by SANRAL through its BOT-based corridor development programme have created a real space for increased budgetary allocation to the agency. In short, Road safety and the supportive road infrastructure can no longer be allowed to continue as the Cinderella of national, provincial and local government budgets.

The range of outputs envisaged in The Road to Safety can be directly read off, in outline, from the Strategic Map on p. 23 above. Some of them are already in place, like the new alcohol limits, the ban on cell-phone use while driving, the new integrated school road safety curriculum and the provincial commitment in the Arrive Alive Business Plan 2000-2001 to attending to a minimum of 10 hazardous locations per province and developing supportive community-based pedestrian safety programmes.

Most of the others fall squarely into the framework of short to medium term interventions that provide the core content of our strategic objectives. We can summarily point to them from here.

We want better drivers. We will therefore implement the following actions:

• Complete the tender process for implementation of a (multi-lingual, touch-screen, audio-visual) computerised learner driver’s licence test system, with a view to minimising corruption at the first stage of the licensing process and making the system more accessible to historically disadvantaged applicants;

• Immediately upgrade the 20% of currently sub-standard Driving Licence Testing Centres (DLTCs);

• Upgrade the skills of driving licence examiners through a system of formal two-yearly re-registration tied to compulsory refresher courses;

• Expand the numbers and upgrade the capacity of the current DLTC Inspectorate, to create increased technical competency and bring strong forensic auditing skills into the system;

• Move towards an inspection regime requiring a minimum of four unannounced inspections per DLTC per annum, supported as necessary by ad hoc inspections in response to specific public complaints;

• Investigate formalising and regulating the driving school sector (including advanced driver training institutions). This would be likely to include: introducing tight accreditation criteria for owners and managers; setting clearly-defined customer service standards; establishing properly graded and differentiated skills requirements for instructors, so as to ensure effective driver training across the full range of vehicle types;

• Review the existing K-53 driving licence test system and update it where necessary to ensure that it is fully meeting real-life driving skill demands and safety awareness needs, and that manuals and procedures are culturally accessible to all applicants;

• Tighten the existing practical, theoretical and medical tests for the renewal of the Professional Driver’s Permit (PrDP);

• Ensure, through operator regulation, that professional drivers’ working hours and conditions do not militate against safe driving (fatigue etc.)

• Examine a range of sentencing options for traffic violations, including licence suspensions under the AARTO demerit points system, and—for specific grades of offence— community service sentences and/or mandatory licence re-testing.

We want safer vehicles. We will therefore implement the following actions:

• Review the operation of the entire vehicle testing system, both in terms of its ownership structure and in terms of the effectiveness of current manuals, regulatory procedures and monitoring systems. This will require the development of stringent criteria for owner/manager accreditation and registration, rigorous management standards, clearly-defined examiner competencies and appropriate levels of ongoing refresher training in vehicle safety system changes (which will be required for the compulsory two-yearly re-registration of examiners);

• Review the current operations and strength of the Vehicle Testing Station Inspectorate with a view to expanding its numbers, improving its procedures and upgrading the capacity of its inspectors—with a particular emphasis on forensic auditing and continuously upgraded technical skills;

• As with DLTCs, move towards a regime of at least four unannounced inspections per VTS per annum, plus ad hoc inspections as necessary in response to public complaints;

• In consultation with the heavy freight and public passenger transport sectors, introduce a standard Operator Code of Practice/Fleet Safety Management system which lays down stringent criteria for vehicle maintenance and safety management systems, with appropriately-scaled sanctions for transgressions, up to and including vehicle impoundment/ forfeiture for repeated or gross overloading offences and suspension or loss of operator’s card for general failure to comply with safety standards;

• Build operator consensus around the phased implementation of key vehicle safety technologies like top speed limiters and tyre safety management systems.

As the restructuring of the vehicle testing system and the strengthening of the VTS inspectorate reaches the necessary threshold of institutional capacity, move towards the phasing in of annual roadworthiness tests for all vehicles over a specified age/kilometrage still to be determined.

We want safer pedestrians and cyclists.

We will therefore implement the following actions:

• Ensure full provincial and local implementation of the new Pedestrian Facility Guidelines and the new SA Road Safety and Speed Limits Manuals.

• Support the commitment by provinces to carry out planned, continuous, multi-disciplinary upgrades of identified urban & rural hazardous locations, with community participation via democratically structured Safety Forums.

• Expand rural road upgrade/maintenance programmes nationwide—supported by systematic funding of emergent construction SMMEs—while at the same time integrating safety training into the process of improving road quality and visibility.

As you will see, running through all of these interventions is the issue of structural reform to our regulatory and enforcement institutions. Though these reforms have been presented within the context of safer drivers, vehicles, pedestrians, cyclists and infrastructure, taken together they can be said to amount to a strategic objective in their own right. The steps we intend to follow in implementing all these structural and system changes in the short term are spelt out in greater detail below, from pages 36 to 43.

Around these actions, however, lies a cluster of supportive activities—mainly belonging to the spheres of "education, communication and public participation" and "institutional reform/quality monitoring." While these will play a crucial momentum-building role in the short to medium term, they are also part of the long-term safety building process. Similarly, while some of the reform issues—like the restructuring of the inspectorates and the re-shaping of the vehicle testing regime—may require sharp institutional breaks or modifications, the system improvements and user group outcomes sought from these changes will inevitably only come through in the medium to long term, as full compliance is gradually achieved through enhanced monitoring capacity and effectively experienced sanctions.

A fuller view of the flow between short, medium and long-term actions is presented in the Intervention Table at the end of this document.

The long-term view: the importance of participation and education

We want informed, empowered and involved communities. As we look towards the long-range elements of the strategy, we see that the sphere of "education, communication and public participation" will carry ever-increasing importance as the area in which the foundations of cultural change are laid.

While the impacts here can be quite dramatic in the short term—e.g. through effective media communications campaigns and passenger and community empowerment measures—the consolidated outcomes we are looking for are likely to be measured in school generations and decades rather than months or years.

Though the sphere of cultural change is much more difficult to subject to precise prediction and targeting, it is at least as important as the other spheres in the achievement of long term compliance. We see it this way for two main reasons:

Firstly, consent is always in general terms preferable to coercion. Secondly, South Africa’s history of coercion without consent leaves us with a powerful inherited need to ensure that meaningful forms of democratic participation are built. Without these, it will remain difficult to create the critical mass of belief in the values of civic responsibility and mutual care upon which a sustainable culture of safe road behaviour depends.

Community involvement and participation starts out from the youngest of our school children and ends with organised passengers, mobilised communities and committed road safety forums. It focuses on cooperation to overcome crime and ensure law compliance. It demands accountability from public transport operators and accessibility from road designers, infrastructure engineers and land-use planners. Its goal is to integrate active community safety organisations into every step of local planning and delivery processes, so that their voices are heard and their concerns directly addressed by officials and experts in both provincial and local government.

National Consultative Process

With this in mind, the Minister of Transport has already taken the initiative of convening a series of national consultative workshops inviting participation, input and commitment from government and industry interests and from a wide range of representative civil society organisations.

These are ongoing processes of open and critical dialogue, both on policy priorities and on what the various groupings can commit to, in terms of sponsorship, coordinated support activities and organised actions by communities that can help them to take full charge of their own safety. (These include, for example, such issues as safety-conscious spatial planning, pedestrian safety measures on urban and rural roads, community actions to reduce the threat of stray animals, identification of unroadworthy public passenger vehicles and further initiatives on public transport passenger empowerment).

Provincial Consultation and Mobilisation

The Minister has also been encouraging the extension of this consultative process to the provincial and local government sphere, via additional workshops hosted by the nine MECs for Transport and supported by the participation of the six major Metropolitan Mayors located in the provinces of Gauteng, KZN, Free State, Eastern and Western Cape).

Their task would be to introduce the national strategic framework, clarify the most effective forms of cooperation between provincial and local government and identify the necessary mechanisms and funding resources for local community involvement in road safety programmes. Some of the key focal areas under consideration are:

• Pedestrian safety;

• Cyclist safety (in the broad context of the national Shova Lula bicycle programme—see box);

• Understanding and observance of road signs;

• Commuter vigilance, reporting and preventative action.

Industry interaction

In parallel with these initiatives, the Minister of Transport has also opened up a process of continuous interaction with the major transport industry role-players - minibus taxi, bus, coach and freight operators and transport trade unions - aimed at developing a culture of joint responsibility for the improvement of safety in all areas of operation.

Scholars and the school system

Important strides have already been made in integrating road safety awareness education into the mainstream school curriculum as a set of basic life skills that can be continuously expanded and deepened over time.

The implementation of road safety education has been planned and prepared in great detail by task teams from the Departments of Transport and Education. From 2001 all learners from pre-school level through to Grade 9 will be exposed to systematic, practical road safety education within the framework of the "life-skills" component of Curriculum 21. The NDoT will have all the required learning materials for Grades 10, 11 and 12 ready by 2002, but these modules will only be introduced within the implementation time-frame set by the Department of Education: 2003 for Grade 10, 2004 for Grade 11 and 2005 for Grade 12.

Much time, money and effort has been invested in the new approach, through the development of educational materials tailored to meet the practical, real-life demands of outcomes-based learning. Road safety education will start at the lowest level possible (pre-school age) and will continue up through all the schooling phases on a continually expanding and deepening basis (e.g. from simply being visible and crossing a street safely to the ability to drive vehicles in a fully responsible manner).

Students and the tertiary education system

To further extend the road safety educational cycle, the Minister of Transport will meet with tertiary institutions to request them to begin a process of collaboration with the task teams of the Departments of Transport and Education to devise road safety educational components that will become an integral part of the tertiary education process, linked to career and skills development training for the world of work.

Working with the Transport Education & Training Authority (TETA)

A considerable amount of preparatory work has gone into aligning the Department’s educational and training initiatives with the Sector Skills Plan of the TETA and looking at ways in which these can be jointly developed and fast-tracked, with special reference to building capacity in government and overcoming historical disadvantage.

As the five TETA Chambers – for the Aviation, Maritime, Freight, Passenger and Taxi sectors – consolidate themselves, the Department will play an integral role in their activities. Obviously, from a road safety point of view, the Freight, Passenger and Taxi Chambers are the important arenas of involvement.

The Taxi Chamber, in particular, represents an entirely new initiative, driven by the Department with a view to formalising training support to the industry. An Interim Steering Committee for the body has been set up and is currently in the process of evaluating nominations to serve on its Management Committee. Once this process is completed and a mechanism for the payment of a levy by operators is agreed, the Chamber will formally be launched. It will then be possible to release support funding from the National Skills Fund.

In all three road transport-related Chambers it is envisaged that education and training will be focussed both on business skills and the development of a better understanding of the operational and safety-related aspects of technological innovation in the motor vehicle industry.