The issue of road accidents and fatality is in the news yet again. It will continue to be in the news for years.

I was listening to the radio in my car when I heard Gilberto Martins, acting CEO of the Road Traffic Management Corporation, being interviewed. He was talking about a new initiative called ITEM, which stands for Intelligent Traffic Enforcement Management plan. That sounds good. I also later read about it in the newspapers.

For a long time, I have pointed out all my frustration about the road death problem. What I see is the authorities often saying the correct things but then doing the wrong things. There is no way we are going to bring the death toll down by increasing policing or by increasing punishment. That principle is just plain wrong.

What will work is mutual respect by motorists for one another and a general attitude among motorists that they do not inconvenience others. When such a state of mind evolves, we will see a difference.

In conjunction with such an attitude, what we need is education concerning the physics of driving. This means things like understanding stopping distance, why cars skid and what happens when the road is wet.

In the newspaper article that I read, Martins reportedly said that we need to create heightened awareness. Yes, I said, that is correct. Then the paragraph went on to say that, to do this, we need better detection and prosecution. No! You cannot use a bigger and bigger stick for ‘awareness’. ‘Awareness’ needs carrot, not stick.

Martins said that we needed greater visibility of traffic officers. I have mixed feelings about that. Firstly, there are not enough police officers in the country to have them on all roads. So ‘visibility’ means what? By ‘visibility’, what I would like to see is just one officer at a busy intersection at rush hour directing traffic and actually helping. But what I see is police officers sitting behind speed traps, waiting to get their next victim.

A while ago, I had to laugh when I read a newspaper report that said that, in some town, the traffic fine books for the cops had not been delivered and a cop asked how they could be expected to do law enforcement with no traffic fine books. The answer is: Go out there and be helpful, for once.

Unfortunately, Martins spoke a lot about ‘effective detection’, which means how to catch people.

What was also said is that it was found that in many accidents ‘human error had played a prominent role’. I agree, entirely. So, what does ‘human error’ mean? It means that someone made a mistake. The mistake does not have to be illegal. Maybe someone went around a corner on a wet road too fast and skidded. One can skid in bad conditions, even if one is travelling under the speed limit. That is a case of not knowing the physics of driving.

A case in point is the recent major truck crash in Pinetown. It seems that a big truck came down a long hill, took the offramp and then could not stop and ploughed into a number of vehicles. That is the physics of driving.

When one has a huge weight (the correct term in physics is ‘mass’) going down a hill, even slowly, there are massive forces involved. A little bit of ‘human error’ can easily result in a big problem, particularly if the person has little understanding of the forces involved.

Martins was reported as saying: “Apart from issu- ing notices, enforcements would concentrate on arrest, discontinuation and impoundment of vehicles.” That is not the way to address ‘human error’.

If the ‘human error’ was attributable to an owner who did not bother to keep his truck’s brakes in order, then, yes, throw the book at him. But what about the minibus taxis that drive over traffic islands, drive on the wrong side of the road into oncoming traffic, intentionally drive through red lights and turn left from the right lane without warning.

Are the cops serious about that attitude? If so, then let us see real intent in analysing the problem. Do not talk of ‘zero tolerance’ and ‘increased detection’, which merely mean more speed cameras on freeways.