Cape Town - The year started off with the usual statement by Minister of Transport Dipuo Peters, claiming a decrease in fatalities on our roads during the 2014 festive season.
Peters claimed that there was a decrease of 50 fatal crashes and 25 fatalities in the period of December 1 to December 30 last year.
Over the same period in 2013, the Transport Department recorded 974 fatal crashes and 1168 fatalities, compared with the 924 fatal crashes and 1143 fatalities claimed by the minister last year.
Peters and her department are exposing themselves with these stats – they are being manipulated to make the department look good.
The 2013 festive season measuring period was December 1, 2013 to January 7, 2014. In 2012, the measurement period was December 1, 2012 to January 10, 2013. The measuring period for 2014 was from December 1, 2014 to January 5, 2015.
MISMATCHED
The minister and her department are consistent with being inconsistent. As a result, the department gets it reliably wrong year after year as mismatched measuring periods are used.
But this is not the only inaccuracy with road crash statistics. It cannot be that so early on in the year that the minister could already present to the South African public road death figures for the 2014 festive season when mortuaries across the country are yet to finalise their reports on corpse numbers.
These stats take 30 days to consolidate. The minister’s report ought to have followed the final reports from the mortuaries, rather than relying only on incident reports from police officers attending cases on the roads.
The carnage on our roads cannot be properly tackled unless we have accurate and complete statistics. Certainly there are other problems, the Medical Research Council (MRC) does not produce regular reports on the status of road deaths in the country.
Their last report was produced in October 2012, and according to that report, 17 076 South Africans were killed in road traffic crashes in 2009. However, the official report from the Road Traffic Management Corporation at the time had road deaths at 10 857. This is just one example of the extent of the under- or over-reporting problem.
TRUE PICTURE BLURRED
Even more alarming is the view taken by many in the transport fraternity and other road safety experts and monitoring groups (like the MRC) that these numbers do not represent the true story of the horror on our roads.
We have long cautioned against the national Department of Transport’s reliance on police reports as an indicator of road deaths; it is an intrinsically flawed measure as it is susceptible to error and will often only represent the deaths recorded at a particular crash site that the police responded to, and not subsequent deaths arising from injuries.
There are more accurate ways of producing these statistics. In the Western Cape, fatality statistics are provided by the Western Cape Department of Health’s Forensic Pathology Services, sourced from mortuaries across the province. These statistics are collated from the victims cause of death, and are differentiated between the classes of fatalities; driver, passenger, pedestrian, cyclist and motor cyclist. This is a deadly accurate measure of road deaths that is crucial for successful interventions.
Road deaths are an avoidable tragedy that the department must work to prevent, rather than sweep under the carpet with incomplete, and even fake, statistics. -Cape Argus
Manny de Freitas is a DA MP and spokesman on transport.