admin
A major effort to enforce road safety over the Easter weekend saw Zimbabwe remaining in roughly the same place as last year, but only because of either incredible luck or divine mercy, two disasters were avoided after two buses veered off the road and overturned.
And relying on luck is not really the way forward, although the concentration by road safety authorities on limiting bus speeds did probably help turn the two potential disasters into just bad accidents.
The weekend death rate sank very slightly, from 29 last year to 27 this year, about seven percent, but the number of injured rose a bit more from 145 to 159, about 9,7 percent. The number of accidents hardly shifted falling slightly from 288 to 286, less than one percent. So in the end we ran very fast to stay in the same place, and even then relied on luck.
But it could have been a lot worse. On Good Friday, an Andile Coaches bus veered off the Harare-Chirundu and overturned, injuring 14, and on Easter Monday a Link Coaches bus hired by a church veered off the Mutare-Masvingo highway in broad daylight and landed on its roof, but all 75 on board exited safely.
The police are obviously investigating how buses veer off the road and overturn. There could be suspicions that the veering with enough energy to overturn meant they were travelling faster than was safe in the circumstances, but on the other hand the absence of serious injury suggests that if the speed was excessive it was not that excessive, so the enforcement of speed limits for buses may well have helped. Considering just how bad these two accidents could have been, we hope the police investigation and the measures taken by the two companies to find out exactly what happened are done very carefully, so we know how close we came to a disaster and what ameliorated this.
While the Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure Development has made strenuous efforts, including legally demanding speed tracking, to prevent buses speeding over the 100km/h set by law, it is not uncommon for the safe speed in certain circumstances on certain stretches of road to be less than the limit, and there a careful driver will slow down further.
The police also reported at least two pedestrians killed after being hit by cars. Since they had the details of the cars we presume that the drivers did stop and render help, and then made the required police report. Considering the increase in hit-and-run accidents this is an advance.
There are a lot of problems with pedestrians and cars on the same stretch of road and in many cases both the driver and the pedestrian are at fault. Pedestrians quite often walk on the left side of the road, rather than face oncoming traffic by walking on the right where they can at least dive into the roadside if they see a dangerous driver approaching. And pedestrians do often take chances in how they cross a road.
But drivers speed, making it difficult for the pedestrian to work out when it is safe to cross, and some drivers just assume that the pedestrian will leap into a ditch as they pass or use the verge, and that the driver does not have to show the slightest consideration. Some of the education work on road users needs to tackle both sides.
Once again the police, who do have to analyse every accident, made it clear that all the Easter accidents were the result of driver error, not mechanical faults or bad roads or any other cause. For every Easter accident there was at least one person to blame, the driver, even if others contributed. So every accident was preventable. If every driver had acted properly there would have been zero accidents, zero injuries and zero deaths.
The driver errors were the usual: speeding, inattention, misjudgement, overtaking error, and failure to observe road rules and regulations by drivers. And combined these mistakes and errors killed 27 people and injured 159. That is a very high price to pay for mistakes that need not have happened.
Most drivers overestimate their level of competence and their skills. But by definition exactly half of all drivers are below average, and when that average is not particularly wonderful, as is the case in Zimbabwe, that is a very scary statistic.
Even very good drivers, at least when it comes to skills, frequently break just about every road regulation in existence in their impatience. You can see this just standing at any major city intersection at peak hour traffic when there might be only an occasional driver who follows the rules.
A good example can be found among many kombi drivers. Those who use public transport will often admire their skill, the serious attention and the concentration they pay to traffic.
They are not bad drivers as such and most are good. But almost all regard large swathes of the Highway Code as a list of optional extras. There are exceptions, but not enough.
We do not need to return to the days of the old dispensation when a bunch of police officers decided to convert traffic regulations to a money-making machine, but we do need to have better enforcement. Modern technologies can help here. Already the police can tell when most buses speed since the speeds are recorded and monitored automatically in real time.
Other technologies can be used to run automatic speed traps, and record vehicles that breach the road regulations at traffic lights and more technology is being created all the time. Zimbabwe could start at just a basic level and move monitoring equipment around while over a few years building up the levels to the desired degree.
And perhaps the Zimbabwe Traffic Safety Council could build up its education campaign by using as examples, real mistakes made by drivers in actual accidents, to show how easy it is to kill or injure someone else and make more drivers think about what they are doing.
Online Reporter