Reckless drivers are taking the lives of our children

Four children die daily due to road incidents on South African roads. It’s a shocking statistic that makes you sick to your stomach.

Those road deaths equate to more than 100 children dying at a young age every month… and almost 1 300 each year. Moms, dads, brothers, sisters, grandparents, aunts and uncles have to deal with the tragic news when told of the loss of those children.

Many heartbroken families don’t recover. Many families suffer more than one tragedy on our roads.

It’s revealed 60% of child victims were pedestrians, 36% were passengers and child cyclists and under-age drivers each accounted for 2% of the deaths.

Road Traffic Management System said a whopping “62% of motor vehicle fatalities stem from driver behaviour, while only 8.5% relate to vehicle factors”.

The Road Accident Fund said this week: “The five-year average for road fatalities among schoolgoing children aged five to 19 in South Africa is 1 288. This is proof that road users are not doing enough to save children’s lives.”

ALSO READ: 4 school children die daily in accidents: Outcry over road carnage

No kidding. We simply don’t have a plan to curb these alarming death rates on our roads, especially after Transport Minister Barbara Creecy this month revealed that preliminary data shows a 5.3% year-on-year increase in festive road-related fatalities and a 4.2% year-on-year increase in road crashes nationwide, with 1 502 deaths from 1 234 crashes.

Discovery Insure CEO Robert Attwell said their data revealed that “just 20 seconds of cellphone use per trip raises accident risk by over 60%, making it the primary contributor to road accidents, surpassing speeding”.

Discovery’s Safe Journey to School Programme, launched in partnership with Afrika Tikkun, is geared at protecting vulnerable students by giving them “telematics technology to measure their driving behaviour and help them identify areas of improvement”.

Since its inception, the programme has a perfect safety record with more than 750 drivers on board and serving 22 300 scholars daily in the Western Cape and Gauteng.

It’s a step in the right direction. But we need to do far more.