Drastic proposal to curb road carnage

daveza

daveza

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http://www.iol.co.za/motoring/industry-news/drastic-proposal-to-curb-road-carnage-1.1

About 40 people a day are killed on South African roads, R306 billion is lost to the economy and R15 billion is paid out to road accident victims each year.

These unacceptable statistics have resulted in drastic changes being proposed to the National Road Traffic Act. Included are a two-year probation period for first-time applicants of driving licences, the reduction of the legal alcohol content limit to 0.05 percent for drivers of normal vehicles and 0.02 percent for professional drivers, revised conditions of employment for traffic officers, consistent traffic law enforcement across the country, a common approach for the recruitment of traffic officers and spending R8.7 billion on remedial work to five trouble spots in each province.

This according to transport minister Dipuo Peters, speaking at a National Road Safety Summit held last week for Transport Month under the theme 'Together Championing Road Safety 365 Days'.

WHAT'S IT GOING TO TAKE?

More traffic and road safety officers should be recruited.

Road safety education and awareness programmes should be compulsory.

The provision of pedestrian and non-motorised transport should be assessed with plans to include a 1.5m road reserved for pedestrians and cyclists.

Policy and legislation should be developed and technology introduced to combat driver fatigue and distraction.

Minimum standards should be set by the SABS or the national regulator for all public-transport vehicles. These must include legislation to compel owners to declare the use of the vehicles when taken for roadworthy tests.

Systems should be put in place to expedite the phased implementation of periodic vehicle testing.

Vehicle testing should be reviewed, including compliance monitoring and measures to combat fraud.

Legislation to ensure children's safety in vehicles should be revised or introduced.

Speed limits in areas with high pedestrian activity should be reduced to 40km/h.

Driving schools should teach students in their own languages.

Traffic law enforcement should be declared an essential service with compulsory 24-hour operation.

There should be stiffer penalties for road traffic contraventions.
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Zero = the amount of times the word 'taxi' is mentioned.


spending R8.7 billion on remedial work to five trouble spots in each province.
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?
 
How about actually ENFORCING the laws as they stand right now, and do it for all vehicle without any bias.

Nothing else needs to be done to drastically reduce the carnage on our roads
 
They don't do much enforcing now, except on soft targets - how about starting there?
 
If it wasn't lucrative for them to continue collecting fees owed for speeding fines, they'd actually look at proper markings/signs to warn motorists. How about educating metro police officers & teaching them basic manners?
 
What needs to be done - anybody who drinks and drive have their vehicles crushed.
 
They seem very good at making up new laws and quite useless at enforcing the current ones...
 
Great ideas, but implimentation is probably going to draw a big fat zero.

As daveza also said - not a word about taxis!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Have the ministers got their heads so far up their backsides whilst being driven around in their blue light brigades, that they don't realise that we have a T~A~X~I problem isn SA???! :wtf:
 
Yet again, the government highlight just how little they actually understand about the country's road-traffic situation. But of course, implementing all kinds of tenderpreneuristic plans is the way to go with these clowns. :rolleyes:
 
We have the laziest traffic cops in the world. Pre 94 no one dared run a stop street as you would be immediately fined. These days every stop street is optional as are speed limits. I don't understand how they have not fixed the stop street issue. All you need to do to fix it is get your cops to sit at ANY STOP street and keep picking new ones and issuing fines until people learn to stop. Our enforcement is abysmal and the cops themselves are more interested in bribes than in respect of the law. I blame the current leadership 100%.

Adding new rules will do nothing. Actually getting the cops to do their jobs may just help.
 
Cius said:
We have the laziest traffic cops in the world. Pre 94 no one dared run a stop street as you would be immediately fined. These days every stop street is optional as are speed limits. I don't understand how they have not fixed the stop street issue. All you need to do to fix it is get your cops to sit at ANY STOP street and keep picking new ones and issuing fines until people learn to stop. Our enforcement is abysmal and the cops themselves are more interested in bribes than in respect of the law. I blame the current leadership 100%.

Adding new rules will do nothing. Actually getting the cops to do their jobs may just help.
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They'd rather sit alongside long stretches (often downhill) of road with a ridiculously low speed limit and point their cameras.
 
Cius said:
We have the laziest traffic cops in the world. Pre 94 no one dared run a stop street as you would be immediately fined. These days every stop street is optional as are speed limits. I don't understand how they have not fixed the stop street issue. All you need to do to fix it is get your cops to sit at ANY STOP street and keep picking new ones and issuing fines until people learn to stop. Our enforcement is abysmal and the cops themselves are more interested in bribes than in respect of the law. I blame the current leadership 100%.

Adding new rules will do nothing. Actually getting the cops to do their jobs may just help.
Click to expand...

Exactly! It is infuriating to see from taxi drivers up to soccer moms in porche cayennes treating red lights and stop signs as optional road suggestions. so fekking annoying when they just skip an intersection because it is inconvenient.
 
Cius said:
We have the laziest traffic cops in the world. Pre 94 no one dared run a stop street as you would be immediately fined. These days every stop street is optional as are speed limits. I don't understand how they have not fixed the stop street issue. All you need to do to fix it is get your cops to sit at ANY STOP street and keep picking new ones and issuing fines until people learn to stop. Our enforcement is abysmal and the cops themselves are more interested in bribes than in respect of the law. I blame the current leadership 100%.

Adding new rules will do nothing. Actually getting the cops to do their jobs may just help.
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Agreed.
Also, traffic light rules seems to have changed. The taxi`s started it, now everybody seems to do it. I lost a car and gained some back issues after a taxi did the below with us.

Yellow means speed up and red means another 2 maybe 4 cars can rush through the intersection.
I`m so tired of these fools decreasing speed limits etc. when they can`t even enforce the current legislation properly.

As a side rant: Everybody is so impatient on the roads. As example the highways.
They don`t use the keep left pass right rules (somehow our 'comrades' :whistle: didn`t learn about it), they cut in-front of others with fast sharp swerves, trucks racing up people`s back ends (ideal brake fail scenario`s) cause an accident and then everyone grinds to 5km/h for 30km staring blindly at the accident like idiots (even when it`s in the yellow line not affecting the road) and then suddenly have the revelation that they were going home so go back to 120km/h instantly.
 
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They probably had a room of gurus thinking for a year to come up with this drivel, but they can waste as much paper and money as they want, until its properly ENFORCED, no one will give a flying $#%.
Here is another one for you- add extra sentence making speed limit 20km/h and then you have no road deaths on paper, in reality things will stay the same...
 
To start, how about:

a) Taking pedestrians to task. AFAIK up to 50% of those killed on the roads are pedestrians and its no wonder. Just drive down the N2 or R300 down here and see people running across a 8 lane highway. Proper enforcement here can take a healthy bite out of those figures.

b) Fix the darn roads. Some are so bad in regards to general road markings that its a wonder there are not more accidents. Not even speaking about the surface conditions (i.e. potholes) on some.

c) Enforcement. Stop hiding behind the bushes and actually do something constructive.

d) Do a proper audit of all driver licences and get those false/fraudulent ones out the system and those drivers off the road.
 
as has already been said, enforcement of existing law would be a major step forward, the Jo'burg Metro Photo Dept are useless at anything other than sitting behind cameras all day, moving violations happen all round them but it's not their problem.

a couple of years ago I was in the UK and we had to pull off into the emergency lane on an off-ramp to quickly administer some insulin to my brother-in-law's kid. Within in 2 minutes we had a cop car behind us with flashing lights wanting to know what was the problem, was everything okay, alerting us to the fact that we were creating a hazard and waited for us to finish the medication and start moving off before they continued their patrolling, now that's law enforcement as it should be!
 
ToxicBunny said:
How about actually ENFORCING the laws as they stand right now, and do it for all vehicle without any bias.

Nothing else needs to be done to drastically reduce the carnage on our roads
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This and nothing else needs to be done .
 
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