The Road to Safety

2001-2005

Road Traffic Management - Mission, Strategic Objective and Key Focal Areas

Mission

The Department of Transport’s Mission Statement for South African roads was defined in the 1996 White Paper on Transport Policy. It is:

"To ensure an acceptable level of quality in road traffic, with the emphasis on road safety, on the South African urban and rural road network".

What is "an acceptable level"? It is what all of us as South Africans jointly decide is acceptable, through a continuous process of open debate and consultation, founded on accurate information and taking into account both economic and fiscal realities and comparable international trends in developed and emerging countries.

Strategic objective

In order to realise the mission, an equally clear and simple strategic objective is required. We have set this objective as being:

"To reduce crashes, deaths and injuries on South Africa’s roads by 5% year-on-year until the year 2005 - at a saving to the economy of R770 million per annum - and then, based on the strengthened institutional platform created, by at least 10% year-on-year until the year 2009."

The targets have been set in carefully separated stages to take realistic account of the constraints still facing us in the current phase of fundamental restructuring of road traffic safety management. This restructuring work lies at the heart of The Road to Safety.

In 2005 we will thoroughly review the emerging statistical trends and, if these trends are as positive as we hope, recommit ourselves to the more ambitious target of 10% (or, if justified by progress, consider setting a higher target).

Key Focal Areas

In the draft discussion document, Strategy 2000: An End to Carnage on South Africa’s Roads, we defined four key thematic areas for action. These were:

• Enforcement & Law Compliance

• Operator, Vehicle & Driver Fitness

• Infrastructure, Management & Information Systems

• Communication, Public Education & Participation

And the implied question was: "How can we make improvements in each of these thematic areas?

The Road to Safety: the new strategic shape

In The Road to Safety we are doing things differently. While we do not lose contact with the thematic areas outlined above, we now subordinate them to a data-driven focus shaped by four outcome-orientated questions:

• Where are the most acute problems and dysfunctions in the current system?

• Who or what should therefore be the priority targets or areas of intervention?

• What outcomes are we seeking to achieve?

• What are the outputs by which we will mark progress towards the achievement of these outcomes?"

In seeking answers to these questions, our starting point has to be the existing road network and the appropriate conditions of entry to or exit from this network. This means: how it supports, is used by, accommodates or should exclude (unfit) drivers and vehicles.

In arriving at decisions on these issues, we make direct use of what our research is telling us about where the critical safety problems are located, and we shape all our interventions in such a way as to make the maximum impact on the clusters of problems identified in each key component of the system: the road environment, the road user and the vehicle.

To each of these we then apply prioritised, targeted, mutually reinforcing measures to ensure that:

• Appropriate legislative and regulatory norms are in force (standards and rules);

• The right systems and institutions are in place to control the road network and conditions of access to it (institutional reform / quality monitoring);

• Compliance is increasingly achieved.

There are in turn two key aspects to compliance:

• Enforcement that is rational, visible, tough and effective (involuntary compliance); and

• Education, communication and public participation initiatives that mobilise individuals and key sectors of the community to become responsible road users and get involved in the active promotion of road safety (voluntary compliance).

Every kind of intervention that we propose in The Road to Safety - whether it is intended for the short, medium or long term - can and must fit into this framework, which is specifically designed to ensure that all our actions support and complement one another.

With this framework in place, we are able to continuously check and re-check the coherence of what we are doing, making sure that particular actions or programmes do not grow out of proportion to their place in the overall scheme, eat up resources that could better be deployed elsewhere or begin destabilising the necessary balance between the three major intervention areas.

It is critically important to make this point because it is in the nature of human enthusiasms and sectoral interests that there will be strong group tendencies to emphasise one aspect of intervention at the expense of all others. Some will emphasise officer staffing issues ("shortage of traffic police on our roads"); some will emphasise corruption in traffic policing, licensing and vehicle testing; some will emphasise vehicle defects or the importance of new vehicle safety technologies; some will emphasise low standards of driver competence and awareness; some will emphasise road infrastructure conditions; some will see draconian sentencing as the cure-all solution for all road safety problems.

Obviously, it is important to keep all these issues in focus. But what we have to recognise is that – while we welcome individuals and groups to approach us, to use the media, and to robustly argue their cases – our role and responsibility as government is to maintain a balanced overview of all the issues, and to deploy both taxpayers’ money and supportive private sector resources where we are convinced they will have the most impact, in the most cost-effective manner possible.

This means seeking the greatest possible degree of clarity about the targets we are setting in terms of user group outcomes, intermediate and long term outcomes; and defining, as precisely as we are able to, the outputs by which we will measure progress.

It also means that for each intervention there must be a clear implementation scenario. Delivery plans will therefore be preceded by solid research and will only be launched with adequate and sustainable funding provision. Where specific programmes require a multi-agency approach, institutional coordination and stakeholder buy-in will be secured in advance. All programmes will be supported by continuous communication, monitoring and review activities.

Finally, we need clarity about values. As a government-led strategy, The Road to Safety has a responsibility to spell out the criteria it will be guided by when strategic priorities are set and hard choices have to be made. In practice, this means the following. While the strategy grapples with complexity, recognises the existence and validity of competing sectoral interests and works for the safety and security of all our citizens and guests, it will, wherever it can reasonably and effectively do so, give priority to the safety and mobility needs of the most disadvantaged sectors of our society, in line with government’s commitment to redistributive delivery and empowerment.

In the interests of pulling together all the dimensions of the strategic task and graphically illustrating the approach outlined above, we have constructed a map of The Road to Safety framework, which is set out below, p.23.