Speed doesn’t kill. Lawlessness does
Speed doesn’t kill. Lawlessness does
South Africa’s roads reveal a deeper crisis than speeding: selective enforcement, public impunity and everyday lawlessness are eroding safety, trust and the very meaning of rules before our children’s eyes. So says BRENDAN BENFIELD…
In the late 1990s, South Africans witnessed the rise of minibus taxis on our roads. What shocked many people was not simply the speed at which the taxi industry expanded, but the speed at which ordinary rules of the road appeared to collapse around it.
Traffic lights became optional; emergency lanes became driving lanes; stopping in the middle of roads became normal; aggressive intimidation of other motorists rapidly became part of daily life on South African roads.
At the time, a friend of mine – no older than 21 – made a remark that has stayed with me ever since. He said that once people publicly watched others break laws without consequence, they would eventually begin to imitate that behaviour themselves – not only on the roads, but in every part of South Africa. Thirty years later, it is difficult to argue that he was wrong.
South Africa suffers from a crisis not merely of crime, but of visible impunity. Roads are simply where the collapse is most obvious. The law is no longer consistently enforced, and where laws are not enforced, they slowly cease to exist in the public mind.
The tragedy is that this behaviour is no longer confined mostly to taxis. Today, one sees all types of motorists behaving in the same way. The lawlessness has become democratised… South Africans have learned from one another that rules are optional and enforcement is unlikely.
Every morning, my family drives through Bryanston along Main Road to drop our children at school. We jokingly refer to it as “crossing the Wild West” but the reality is not funny. In the span of a few kilometres, one witnesses a staggering catalogue of offences: cars driving through red lights without hesitation, emergency lanes treated as additional traffic lanes, turning lanes used as straight lanes, illegal U-turns, intersections blocked entirely, passengers dropped in active traffic and reckless cutting across multiple lanes. Yet there is almost never a police officer in sight.
Humorously though, around midday, a roadblock reliably appears near Westminster Avenue where motorists, like my wife and me, are stopped almost daily to check licence discs, drivers’ licences and outstanding speeding fines. Meanwhile, visibly unroadworthy taxis and unlicensed vehicles simply turn off before the checkpoint and bypass it entirely.
We have pointed this out repeatedly to the officers involved; it usually falls on deaf ears. On one occasion one of the officers actually said to my wife: “We are here to keep you safe.” We still laugh about it at home on occasion. The truth is obvious: it is easier to generate revenue from compliant middle-class motorists than it is to confront genuine road disorder.
The contradiction becomes even more absurd in practice. Last year, I was pulled over on Main Road for travelling at 90km/h in an 80km/h zone. I had been extremely ill and was returning from the pharmacy with medication. I had unintentionally allowed my speed to creep upward while travelling downhill, distracted by not one, but three separate vehicles that drove through red traffic lights directly in front of me.
All three offenders passed the police officers who subsequently stopped me. When I asked why they had not pursued the red-light offenders, despite openly admitting they had seen the violations occur, the response was astonishing: “We are the high-speed pursuit department. We don’t deal with other traffic offences.” That single sentence captures much of what has gone wrong in South Africa.
Government messaging increasingly insists that “speed kills”. It is a politically useful slogan because it is simple, measurable and profitable to enforce. But South Africa’s road crisis is significantly more complicated than that. Our road fatality rate remains among the highest in the world, at roughly 25 deaths per 100,000 people. Nearly half of all fatalities on South African roads are pedestrians. Alcohol also plays a catastrophic role in our road deaths, with various studies estimating extraordinarily high levels of alcohol involvement in fatal crashes.
These are not merely “speed” problems. They are lawlessness problems: drunk driving, pedestrian negligence, red-light violations, reckless overtaking, unroadworthy vehicles, corruption, non-enforcement, driver intimidation… these are the realities ordinary South Africans navigate daily.
Ironically, the world itself remains divided on speed limits. While many cities are lowering urban speed limits in dense pedestrian areas, other countries continue experimenting with higher highway limits as vehicle safety technology improves. Czechia, for example, has begun trialling 150-km/h limits on selected motorway sections. The debate globally is therefore far more nuanced than the simplistic slogan, “speed kills.”
Modern vehicles are vastly safer, more stable and more technologically advanced than the cars upon which many original speed standards were based decades ago. At the same time, traffic engineering research has long recognised that large speed differentials between vehicles can themselves contribute to dangerous driving conditions. In other words, if you drive too slowly, you can be as much of a danger as when you drive too fast.
But South Africa is not having an honest debate about road safety. Instead, we increasingly pursue the easiest form of enforcement: speed cameras, roadside fines and administrative policing aimed primarily at motorists who are already broadly compliant. Meanwhile, truly dangerous lawlessness flourishes untouched.
The greatest tragedy of all is that our children are growing up watching this unfold. We are teaching our daughter to drive, and it is genuinely frightening – not because she cannot operate the vehicle, but because she is entering a road environment where predictability, courtesy and lawful behaviour are steadily disappearing.
A society cannot survive when laws become optional and enforcement becomes selective. Roads are where nations reveal who they truly are. Every morning on South Africa’s roads, we are teaching our children either that rules matter, or that aggression, opportunism and impunity matter more. At the moment, I fear we are teaching the latter.
Additional Sources:
Official South African Government Road Safety Report
Minister Barbara Creecy: Announcement of Preliminary 2024/2025 Festive Season Statistics
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