SA can’t enforce its way out of the road safety crisis
SA can’t enforce its way out of the road safety crisis
South Africa’s road safety crisis is not caused by one failure. Rather, writes NICK PORÉE, it stems from fragmented education, engineering, enforcement, evaluation and governance that urgently require coordinated national reform and professional leadership… right now.
The term “road safety” is a catch-all description for a desired condition that results from a wide range of positive and negative interactions. Achieving an optimum level of safety requires multidisciplinary coordination involving government authorities, private-sector organisations, transport operators and individual road users.
About 1.2 million people are killed in road traffic crashes worldwide each year. More than 90% of these deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries, although those countries have fewer than 60% of the world’s vehicles. More than half of those killed are pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists struck by road vehicles, while road crashes are a leading cause of death among children and young adults between the ages of five and 29. Globally, the economic cost of crashes is estimated at approximately 3% of gross domestic product.
In South Africa, the crash burden is three to four times higher than in developed regions. In 2022, 12,436 people died on the country’s roads, representing a fatality rate of 20.7/100,000 people. More than 100,000 people are also believed to be seriously injured each year.
Pedestrians account for about 43% of road deaths and males represent approximately 75% of fatalities. More recent figures suggest a reduction, but road crash data remains affected by under-recording, inconsistent reporting and delays in processing information.
This already unsatisfactory situation exists at a time of limited economic growth. Should the economy expand, with freight, passenger and private vehicle movements increasing as a result, the absence of effective road safety management could turn an existing crisis into a national nightmare.
A system, not a slogan
Various approaches have been developed to describe and manage road safety. The “SAFE” approach (Servicing and maintenance; Attention; Fatigue management; Environment) recognises the major influence of human behaviour and focuses on trained, disciplined and attentive driving.
Servicing and maintenance require vehicles to be kept in a roadworthy condition – particularly their tyres, brakes, lights, fluid levels and windscreen wipers. Attention refers to concentrating on the road and eliminating distractions. Fatigue management means avoiding extended driving periods and not driving while ill or exhausted. Environment refers to adapting driving to visibility, weather, road conditions, traffic volumes and safe following distances.
From a broader perspective, the coordinated management of road safety requires effectiveness across five disciplines. These can be described as the five Es: education, engineering, enforcement, evaluation and entropy.
South Africa lacks visible, cross-disciplinary leadership capable of reducing the country’s high number of road casualties, despite being a signatory to the United Nations Decade of Action for Road Safety. It is therefore necessary to examine the five Es within the context of South African conditions and practices.
Education
Human behaviour may be the single greatest determinant of road safety, making education in all forms an essential part of managing risk.
Scholars and Public Education: South Africa has about 25,000 schools, 13.5 million learners and more than 12 million motorists. Yet road safety is seldom taught as a structured subject in schools and minimal resources are devoted to sustained public education.
In many developed countries, social media and other communication platforms are used continuously to reinforce messages about responsible road behaviour. These campaigns are particularly important for younger road users and often use practical examples to illustrate both compliance and the consequences of dangerous behaviour.
South Africa’s public messaging is generally concentrated around holiday periods and major enforcement campaigns. Road safety education should instead be continuous, age appropriate and integrated into the school curriculum.
Driver Training: South Africa lacks a driver-training structure supported by professionally developed systems, standardised curricula, recognised qualifications and effective monitoring. Motorist training is effectively a cottage industry delivered by dedicated individuals, but often without formal professional qualifications or consistent supporting material. The result is an overwhelming focus on the K53 rules and passing the driving test, rather than developing competent, observant and responsible drivers.
Commercial drivers are treated in much the same way as ordinary motorists; there are no consistently applied national training curricula, professional examinations or systems for monitoring practical performance. Consequently, some so-called professional drivers have limited knowledge of gear selection, load security, vehicle dynamics, braking safety, brake fade, stopping distances and trailer tracking. Many receive minimal mentored experience before being placed in control of loaded vehicles they have never driven under real operating conditions.
The implications of these shortcomings are serious for road safety, vehicle productivity and the reputation of the transport industry.
Managerial Training: There are few dedicated industrial training facilities for the management of commercial freight and passenger transport outside of university programmes and the in-house training establishments operated by some large companies. As a result, a significant proportion of commercial transport is unregistered, unlicensed or managed by people without the experience and resources required for regulatory compliance.
Vehicle safety cannot be separated from managerial competence. Operators need to understand scheduling, fatigue management, vehicle maintenance, driver selection, incident investigation, load management and legal compliance.
Engineering
Engineering encompasses the design, construction and maintenance of road infrastructure, as well as the technical specifications, performance and mechanical condition of the vehicles using the network.
South Africa’s road conditions range from world-class freeways and surfaced rural roads to remote dirt tracks. Extensive parts of the country, including many informal settlements, are served by gravel roads without pavements, safe crossings, lighting or protected facilities for pedestrians and cyclists. These conditions contribute directly to the risks faced by pedestrians, cyclists and children.
In many areas, roads have deteriorated because of severe potholing, poor drainage and inadequate gravel-road maintenance. Deferred maintenance is frequently linked to budget restrictions, weak project management and the loss of qualified engineers and technical personnel from the public service.
The automotive industry continues to introduce advanced vehicle technologies designed for high-quality road systems. These vehicles include increasingly sophisticated braking, stability, driver-assistance and emissions-control systems.
However, the adoption of advanced vehicles isn’t always matched by growth in professional maintenance capability. In commercial road transport, this is compounded by ineffective monitoring of vehicle condition and inconsistent regulation of vehicle operations. Modern safety technology cannot compensate indefinitely for neglected roads, poor maintenance or inadequate technical competence.
Enforcement
The enforcement of road traffic regulations is largely a provincial or municipal responsibility and is therefore subject to continual budgetary pressure. Provincial traffic departments tend to focus on overloading, speeding, crashes, alcohol offences and visible vehicle infringements. These activities are necessary, but enforcement is often intermittent, predictable and concentrated on a limited number of roads and operating periods.
The Road Traffic Management Corporation (RTMC) costs approximately R1 billion/year, yet its contribution to effective, visible enforcement remains open to question. The Administrative Adjudication of Road Traffic Offences (AARTO) system may introduce additional administrative complexity, disputes and litigation without addressing the underlying causes of dangerous road behaviour.
The limited use of digital surveillance, automated monitoring and integrated reporting weakens enforcement. These shortcomings are compounded by inadequate staffing, fragmented jurisdiction and institutional employment practices that make flexible deployment difficult. In many areas, enforcement is ineffective at certain times of the day, particularly at night and over weekends, when some of the highest-risk driving behaviour occurs.
Enforcement should be intelligence-led rather than simply based on visible roadside activity. Authorities need to identify repeat offenders, unsafe operators, high-risk corridors and vehicles with histories of mechanical non-compliance.
Evaluation
Reliable information is essential to effective road safety management. Vehicle and operator identification, traffic movements, crash recording, maintenance histories, regulatory violations and crash causation factors all need to be captured and analysed. This requires integrated digital systems with built-in analytical capabilities. The results should be available to enforcement officers at the roadside when they interact with drivers, vehicles and operators.
Several large metropolitan municipalities operate their own road safety and traffic systems, some of which perform significantly better than national platforms. However, the broader national system remains heavily dependent on information supplied by the overstretched South African Police Service. Incomplete crash records and inconsistent coding make it difficult to identify trends, assess interventions or determine whether policies are producing meaningful results.
South Africa cannot manage what it does not measure accurately. Decisions about road design, enforcement deployment, driver training and vehicle regulation should be based on current evidence rather than assumptions.
Entropy
The entire road safety system suffers from entropy, fragmentation and weak coordination between national, provincial and municipal authorities. There is an urgent need for national intervention to create an integrated, digitised database. The current eNaTIS system is outdated and burdened with records that cannot always be verified, corrected or removed efficiently.
The National Road Traffic Act also requires a comprehensive overhaul. Its decades-old structure contains provisions that are outdated, impractical or poorly suited to contemporary transport operations and digital enforcement. Operator, vehicle, driver, testing and registration processes need to be redesigned as parts of an interactive national system. Such a system should support the monitoring of drivers, operators, vehicles, maintenance activities and enforcement outcomes.
It should also enable enforcement by a competent and properly informed transport regulator with the authority to apply proportionate administrative sanctions for non-compliance. This would be more effective than relying predominantly on criminal prosecution or imposing severe penalties that are difficult to administer consistently. Enforcement is especially challenging in a country where many people lack stable addresses or reliable communication systems and where roadside processes remain vulnerable to corruption.
A national reset is essential
Effective road safety management results from coordinated action across all these disciplines. South Africa’s current safety performance reflects the inadequacy of its fragmented systems, limited resources and weak institutional coordination. The situation will deteriorate without planned professional intervention and a fundamental restructuring of the national road safety effort.
An independent, professional consultancy team with international-calibre expertise and strong local support should be appointed to design an integrated national system capable of expanding over the next 30 years. That process must include government, enforcement authorities, transport operators, road engineers, vehicle manufacturers, training specialists, insurers, researchers and representatives of vulnerable road users. Most importantly, restructuring must be protected from the institutional interests that benefit from preserving the present arrangement.
South Africa does not lack road safety legislation, agencies or public campaigns. It lacks an integrated system in which every institution understands its responsibility, reliable information guides decisions and failure carries consequences. Until that changes, road safety will remain an aspiration rather than a measurable national outcome.
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