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We continue to see and experience bus crashes, despite some worthwhile pauses over the last festive season and other times of the year, and continually just listing these without trying to do something more effective to stop them is no longer an option.
It is unlikely that there are more bus accidents for every 1 000 000km a bus travels in Zimbabwe than there are car accidents for the same amount of time on the roads.
The biggest problem with bus accidents, even if they are below average, is that a single accident can kill and injure a lot of people, both because of the large number aboard and the mass of the vehicle.
Minister of Transport and Infrastructure Development Felix Mhona has been talking about the sort of action that could be considered for some time now.
Now he is ready to act and is steering some of his desired additions and changes to the road law through the Government’s legal experts.
We hope this initial batch is not the last, and in fact as technology and other methods grow and widen it may be possible to significantly upgrade compliance with road rules.
In the first batch is the use of governors on the drives of buses. This is not a new technology in concept, although a lot of changes in recent years allow easier, more effective and cheaper technologies to be applied.
The basic idea behind the concept is that if you fix the maximum speed for buses at 100km/h, neither the bus owner nor the driver they hire can do anything about it. The bus will not go faster than 100km/h, no matter how hard you lean on the accelerator pedal. The instruction will simply not go through.
This is the important change. Zimbabwe has had a 100km/h speed limit for buses and other heavy vehicles for many years, right back into colonial times. Setting the limit has never been the problem: enforcing the limit has. In theory limits should be enforced by continual checking of timetables, and the continual setting of speed traps.
But neither works that well and drivers still speed at time to catch up, or far worse to get ahead of competitors on the same roads.
In addition across the whole range of available technology it is possible to retain a record of speeds, in the more advanced formats as an electronic data file.
So it is easy to see if a bus company and its staff have figured out how to cheat and circumvent the system. SADC, which faces much the same problems, has endorsed the 100km/h speed limit, plus upgrading entry level qualifications for bus drivers to even go for testing, wanting people a little older and a little more experienced on the road.
So this is likely to come into force soon, but it will only plug one gap, the bus gap.
At the same time we are continually upgrading our roads, a major Government programme and one that most people support. But we also need to build up our enforcement of traffic rules. Damaged and pot-holed highways do limit speeds, since it is often impossible to drive fast on such roads.
But these new modern rebuilt roads we are now seeing are allowing traffic to flow a lot more smoothly, and regrettably not just faster, but faster than the speed limits we consider safe.
Speed is a major killer on the roads, and certainly on the major reconditioned highways.
When you double the speed of a vehicle you double the energy that vehicle is carrying, and when you triple the speed you multiply by the nine the energy.
This energy not only has to be released almost instantly in a crash, regardless of the vehicle’s speed, but also makes control very difficult.
Zimbabwean drivers do not have to be tested on high-speed roads, or given formal instruction on these roads, just as they do not have to be taught at night or tested in dark roads.
Germany is the one country that insists on all this extra driver training and testing, and that shows in German accident statistics. They are lower.
Even in Zimbabwe, our bus drivers tend to be among the most skilled drivers on the road. Anyone watching a bus being reversed into a loading bay at a terminus will understand that, and it is easy to see other exhibitions of skill.
We should remember that a bus driver has climbed an instructional and testing ladder from small cars via large trucks to buses.
But just because someone can do something properly does not mean that they will do it every time, and people, including bus drivers, do take chances, sometimes quite silly ones. Then you get the problem when a driver moves out of their own envelope of skills, and out of the envelope of the mechanical attributes of the bus. It is all very well having a speed limit of 100km/h for buses if the highest safe speed on a tight curve on a mountainous road is half that, or even less.
Bus drivers, as we have seen in some accident reports, also have to cope with extreme stupidity by other drivers.
Minister Mhona is also talking about replacing the present Zimbabwean drivers licence. It will take some time to replace them all, but perhaps special efforts can be taken to replace those for bus drivers.
This would allow each bus driver to be called in for a special course and seminar, being part of a group analysing a string for fairly recent bus crashes and coming up with what should have been the correct decisions and correct reactions. It is a lot cheaper to learn from other people’s mistakes.
At the same time the decisions to impose speed governors on buses should not, in this modern electronic age with so much electronic control within vehicles, stop the extension to other vehicles. It should be relatively easy to put in place electronic controls that stop anyone driving at more than 120km/h.
As time goes on, and we imagine the manufacturers of electric cars, now just starting to take over the world’s roads, must be under some pressure to allow simple command posts along roads to fix top speeds on each stretch.
In any case smaller and poorer countries like Zimbabwe should be pressing for the necessary technology transfers so we can upgrade the safety of our roads.
Online Reporter