Editorial Comment: More than laws needed for road safety

More than 1 500 people die on Zimbabwe’s roads every year, around five a day, with another 20 000 or so injured.

About 90 percent of accidents are due to driver error, despite people worrying about the state of the roads and the serviceability of vehicles. This makes sense.

Bad roads slow you down, and drastically shorten the life of suspensions, but do not kill. Faulty vehicles, unless it is something like the brakes, leave people stranded on the side of the road, but rarely kill or injure.

Even the 10 percent not directly due to driver error often include some driver faults: People driving too fast to stop quickly enough if there is an obstruction on the road or a cow suddenly decides to amble across; people diving outside their envelope of skills to cope when there is a tyre burst.

We move down to driver error as the main target for our road safety efforts. Experts generally agree that the biggest killers are speeding, driving under the influence of alcohol, refusing to obey stop signs and red lights, unsafe overtaking, inattention, lack of knowledge or application about safe following distances, and lack of knowledge about reaction times and braking distances, or refusal to apply that knowledge.

Some statistics are hard to come by, largely because enforcement is minimal. Alcohol levels are rarely if ever tested, yet anyone who drives after drinking two beers is breaking the law and in normal times, when bars are open, there are thousands on the evening streets breaking that law.

Using a mobile phone while driving is as dangerous, according to international research, as driving over the limit, yet people do this with impunity and few realise the danger.

Speeding is common, with many drivers even boasting about how fast they drive, yet speed traps are exceptionally rare. Even checks at intersections are, these days, almost non-existent.

Part of the enforcement problem dates from the last years of the First Republic where, under a corrupt commissioner-general, traffic police and police stations were allowed to set up a myriad roadblocks to raise cash, with most of that effort on easy-to-fine offences, such as not having a red triangle or a non-working rear number-plate light at midday, rather than on serious safety issues.

Even when there was more rational enforcement, speed traps were set up at odd places where speed limits were obviously wrong to maximise fines, rather than where speeding drivers killed people.

In fact that fine-centred enforcement did basically nothing to reduce accident rates, while a quarter the effort on safety-centred enforcement could have saved hundreds of lives a year.

The need to fix enforcement, using the correct emphasis, is important in light of proposed measures announced by Transport and Infrastructural Development Secretary Engineer Thedius Chinyanga to a Parliamentary portfolio committee last week to roll out a points system for traffic offenders.

While big serious fatal accidents will end up in court, if the offending driver is among the survivors, the overwhelming majority of accidents result in admission-of-guilt fines at the local police station and no one keeps track.

Under the points system someone will, so as those little fines accumulate they are entered into the database and attract points. And when you hit the limit your licence is suspended.

This is common in many countries, and has been shown to deter a lot of bad driving. Those countries also have general enforcement, so treating a red light as a give-way, not necessary dangerous, but still an offence, or speeding, even if only a little over a limit, give a modest fine and some points.

In Britain this has resulted in drivers just one point under the limit, driving as if they are on their test.

Those same countries also simply suspend a licence for a year if you are over the alcohol limit, and they test frequently.

Zimbabwe has these alcohol laws, right up there with best international practice, but they are not enforced. In fact Zimbabwe’s road traffic regulations and Road Traffic Act are generally of world standard, and the Highway Code incorporates modern research and exceptionally high standards.

The point system is just a start. It will do something about those who bump other cars in low velocity rear-end shunts and the rest of the non-court offences that come to the attention of traffic police after the daily toll of minor accidents.

But it will not do much about it since very few people are these days committing enough safety offences resulting in an accident in three years or five years to merit a suspension.

We are back to enforcement, but this time intelligent enforcement. Speed traps are essential, since so many accidents result from excessive speed.

In some countries these are automated, snapping the licence-plate as the speeder goes through. Cameras on robots do the same thing for red lights, and avoid the frequent arguments between drivers and police officers over just how much in default a driver was.

Breathalysers are simple and cheap, and almost certainly a decent Zimbabwean manufacturing company could make them under licence to give patrols a decent stock.

Just checking drivers involved in accidents or those caught committing other safety offences would be a start, although the random checks of drivers leaving a bar car park have slashed accident rates in many countries.

Enforcement received a bad name in those corrupt days before November 2017, but some is needed and it can be done properly and intelligently once the prime objective is seen as preventing accidents and deterring illegal behaviour rather than raising fines.

With that sort of enforcement the point system starts making real sense; at the very least it will either take the person who habitually goes 10km/h over the limit off the road or make them reform.

At the same time there are other obvious safety changes. One problem is traffic lights. Many do not work and most drivers at night treat them as give-way signs after scare stories of robberies, although there are very few such criminals at lights.

But Harare City Council has said in the past that a roundabout costs about the same as a set of lights, and as so many lights now need replacement, it seems sensible where there is room for a roundabout to put one in instead.

Most major junctions on arterial roads and ring roads do have the space.

The Transport Ministry already has the required laws on the books, and its efforts to keep up to date with technology and best practice is commendable. But laws are meaningless if not enforced, and are brought into disrepute if enforced badly.

Traffic accidents over the past 12 months have killed about the same number of people as Covid-19, so we have to fix that problem. This is why the Transport Ministry’s efforts have to be complemented by sane and effective enforcement.