The Department of Transport - Arrive Alive

What's it all about?

THE PROBLEM AND OUR OBJECTIVES

The ARRIVE ALIVE Road Safety Campaign was initiated by as a short-term initiative to reduce the carnage on South Africa's roads. The first campaign ran from 1 October 1997 to the end of January 1998. The second campaign focussed on the Easter holidays 1998, and the third campaign (for this year's December holiday period) is in the advanced planning stage. As much as we would like ARRIVE ALIVE to be an on-going campaign, we can only conduct it in phases and expand it according to our ability to raise funds.

The problem of road safety is very simple: between 9,600 and 10,000 people die on our roads every year. Almost 150,000 people are injured in the approximately 500,000 crashes that occur each year. Besides the traumatic emotional cost this has on the social fabric of our society, the CSIR estimates that this costs R11,9 billion to the country's economy.

The main objectives of the campaign are:

• to reduce the number of road traffic accidents in general - and fatalities in particular - by 5 % when compared to the same period the previous year;
• to improve road user compliance with traffic laws; and
• to forge an improved working relationship between traffic authorities at the various levels of government.

For more detail on the nuts and bolts of the campaign - and an outline of the measures we are already putting in place to restructure road traffic management systems and radically shake up South African road users' attitudes towards safety, see Arrive Alive - A Closer Look.