Easter road carnage: Are we focusing on the wrong numbers?

The Easter weekend is still five weeks away, so we’ve got plenty of time to make a little promise to ourselves.

Let’s not wring our hands, gnash our teeth and rend our clothes this year about the Easter weekend carnage.

The real question we should be asking is why aren’t more people killed on the roads during our annual lemming-like rush to the coast or the hinterland?

A quick internet search will show that 10 000 people died on our roads last year.

Divide that by 52 and that’s 192 a week.

There aren’t figures for last Easter, but Easter 2023 claimed 235 lives, a massive spike from the 161 the year before.

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Less people died on Easter weekend in 2022 than they did on other weeks that year – and yet it’s one of the busiest times on the road.

It’s probably down to the publicity campaigns across most media platforms, as well as the significant and highly visible law enforcement presence on our major routes on all points out of Johannesburg; the N1, the N12 and the N14.

It’s the same in the Eastern Cape, Western Cape, KwaZuluNatal and even the Free State.

The problem with all the pre-publicity is that it creates a perception that somehow, you’re taking your life into your hands if you travel over Easter.

Reader, be assured you’re taking your life into your hands every time you leave your house.

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The K53 driving test exists only for the brief moment that an 18 year old (normally), experiences in the testing yard and the short trip beyond before coming back to hear if they’ve failed or passed.

The Highway Code in reality is unintelligible gobbledygook for most road users, including our police, who seem to consider it unenforceable outside of high days, holy days and roadblocks to check for registration discs and licences on highways.

How many times have you seen a JMPD roadblock on a major road at night, 200m down from an intersection with broken traffic lights and unlit road lights?

You’d expect the cops to be out directing traffic, policing transgressions and keeping everyone safe, not hosting a shakedown for unpaid fines.

That same road, only hours before, would have had the peak hour traffic being managed by vagrants in hand-me-down reflector vests – in between panhandling.

It’s amazing that we are not killing 10 000 people a year on Joburg roads alone.

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