Slow down and smell the sunflowers

 Words: Nick van der Leek

I have a knee injury courtesy of a road accident in 1990. Basically the dashboard of the bakkie I was in chomped my knee during impact, dicing out a banana peel of skin just above the kneecap.

That injury serves a reminder at how dangerous and damaging a single road incident can be. The message is: even if you survive, the damage tends to be lasting. It involves a rape of the body – if not the mind – which can last a lifetime. Yet anyone who walks away from an accident can count themselves lucky. Many thousands do not.

14 000 road accident deaths on South Africa’s roads are 14 000 too many. A simple math calculation shows that 14 000 deaths equate to almost 1200 deaths every month, almost 40 a day. If those numbers appear meaningless, imagine a classroom of people wiped out every day. What a waste when all of this is preventable.

The strategy until now has been to focus on the four methods of prevention: wear a seatbelt, control speeding, prevention of drunk driving and driver fatigue. But has it been effective? I don’t disagree with the methods of prevention, but recommend a more holistic approach (inclusive of these strategies). To change behaviour comprehensively, we need something beyond a rule book. We need to change our beliefs about what constitutes happy motoring.

Before we move on, two explicit points should be made. Firstly, South Africans have in the past been vociferously opposed to additional limits on speeding. Having travelled to Australia, a country almost ten times the size of ours, with far better roads, superb public transport infrastructure and half the population, the speed limit there is 110km/h. It’s not 110km/h give or take 10km/h. It’s strictly enforced. In fact on one occasion as we were leaving Perth’s city limits a squad car, lights flashing, actually pulled us over for exceeding a 90km/h speed limit. We were going 92km/h.

The argument, including by the AA, is that speed alone isn’t responsible for road accidents; there are many other causes. True. But that argument is as ridiculous as the alcoholic who claims smoking is worse than drinking as a way to bargain for the right to continue doing something that is ill-advised anyway. Smokers do the same thing, arguing that drinking is worse than smoking. All they gain is the right is make no attempt to do anything, which I maintain is foolish and unacceptable given the realities on our roads. Let’s face it, the accident I was in that nearly tore off my knee took place on the outskirts of Pretoria. We were travelling at roughly 80km/h in a 60km/h zone. The accident happened due to a combination of speeding by my friend (the driver), and impatience, due to someone jumping a traffic light ahead of us as soon as it turned yellow.

More recently someone told me about a biker (on a superbike)who claimed to make the trip from Johannesburg to Bloem in just over 2 hours, and from Bloem to Kimberley’s city centre (180km) in 40 minutes. An ex-girlfriend of mine had one side of her face bludgeoned by a rogue motorbike crashing through the centre of their kombi one night. She’s already had 8 painful reconstructive surgeries. The same accident killed her sister. I’m not sure whether she’d be impressed by his achievement. The point is: none of us should be. As it stands, the statistics show that when human factors are associated with fatal accidents, speeding is the culprit 30% of the time. Exceeding the speed limit is also becoming increasingly expensive – it simply wastes fuel. So it makes absolute sense to drive slower.

Which brings me to the bottom line. In order to address the malaise of negligent driving on South Africa’s roads, from everyday recklessness by minibus taxis, to the everyday cheeky driving by everyone else, we need to inculcate a new value system for our roads. Respect for life is a great place to start. People seem to have a healthy respect for the ocean, and are quickly cowed by reports of fatal shark attacks, even when there are one or two each year. Yet we don’t have similar respect when driving, despite classroom-sized casualty levels every day. Why?

I believe we need a culture that is based on the idea of Protect the Weak. The belief that life is precious needs to be rediscovered. One of the best ways to develop sensitivity to other road users is to ride on a bicycle. After all, the biggest casualty on our roads isn’t drivers killing each other, but people in cars driving into people. I maintain that if all road users are forced to cycle to work for one day in the year, behaviour will begin to change. There’s a way to enjoy driving without racing. Stop often. Photograph roadside birds. Have a picnic. After all, one of the benefits of taking one’s time to get from A to B is having a better quality of life for the rest of one’s journey through life.