Inaccurate road statistics prevents reducing road carnage

The year started off with the usual statement by the Minister of Transport, Dipuo Peters claiming that there was a decrease in fatal crashes and fatalities on our roads during the 2014 festive season. Peters claimed that there was a decrease of 50 fatal crashes and 24 fatalities in the period of 1 December 2014 to 30 December 2014. The Transport Department recorded over the same period in 2013, 974 fatal crashes and 1168 fatalities. For 2014 over the same period, 924 fatal crashes and 1143 fatalities, were claimed by the Minister. The Minister and her department are exposing themselves with these stats. These stats are being manipulated to make the Transport Department look good! The 2013 festive season measuring period was 1 December 2013 to 7 January 2014. In 2012, the measurement period was 1 December 2012 to 10 January 2013. The measuring period for 2014 was from 1 December 2014 to 5 January 2015. The Minister and her department are consistent with being inconsistent. As a result, the department gets it reliably wrong year after year as unequal 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 morgues across the country are yet to finalise their reports on corpse numbers. These stats takes 30 days to consolidate. The Minister’s report ought to have followed the final reports from the morgues, rather than relying only on incident reports from the South African Police Services officers attending cases on the roads. Statistics announced by the Minister are not comparing “apples with apples”. Measuring periods are unequal and therefore this manipulation has the effect of skewing the statistics. Skewed stats are counter-productive. The carnage on our roads cannot be properly tackled unless we have accurate and complete statistics. Certainly there are other problems, the MRC (Medical Research Council) 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 RTMC at the time had road deaths at 10 857. This is just one example of the extent of the under- or over- reporting problem. 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, produced by the National Department of Transport, 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 SAPS reports as an indicator of road deaths; it is an intrinsically flawed measure as it susceptible to error and will often only represent the deaths recorded at a particular crash site that SAPS responded to, and not subsequent deaths arising from injuries sustained during a crash. 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 the planning and implementing of focussed and successful interventions; interventions that can tackle the carnage on our roads head-on. The road death statistics over the festive season reported by Minister Peters were therefore misleading South Africans on an issue of great sensitivity to the public. Road deaths are an avoidable tragedy that the Department of Transport must work to prevent, rather than sweep under the carpet with incomplete and even fake statistics. Minister Peters had, in the past, committed her department to employing measures to more accurately collate road death statistics. When will she be making this happen? I will be challenging her about this issue in Parliament.