• In SA - 18 000 people are killed annually and 150 000 are severely injured. (Medical Research Council statistics)
• On a daily basis, 45 people die and 410 are injured, with 25 people becoming paralyzed.
• Road crashes are the main cause for death in the youth, age 5 - 29. (Ref : World Health Organisation)
  According to the National Injury Mortality Surveillance System (NIMSS) of 2010 SA’s annual road traffic fatality burden is estimated in the region of 18 000, with road traffic deaths of 43 per 100,000 (UK: 6 per100 000, Australia: 8 per 100 000,   USA: 14 per100 000 - according to WHO.) CSIR says road crashes costs SA R309 Billion annually. DoT still loosely talk about approximately 14 000 deaths a year- but most people involved with road safety feel these are largely incorrect and the crashes/deaths and injuries are underreported.

Research Poll - ArriveAlive  No.of times people been breathalyzed in SA.     22.6.12

None = 71%.   Once =14%.    2 to 5 times = 7%.    5 to 10 times = 0%.   Lost count = 7%.

We need much more testing sothat people do not attempt to drink then drive.In Australia they aim to test each driver 3 times a year.

The only thing that changes behaviour is if people are afraid of the legal and finacial repurcussions of their actions.

 76% of SA Drivers break the Law each day on the roads.

Nov 2010 (AA and BP Ultimate research)

"What kills more children than Aids? Roads!"

"The tragic toll from traffic accidents doesn’t just cost lives. It wastes resources too" - Lord George Robertson

As a former Nato Secretary-General I am familiar with the cold calculus of potential body counts when assessing threats to national security. But I’m still taken aback by our failure to face one of the gravest, most preventable, risks facing people across the world.

This year about 1.3 million people will die on the world’s roads. About 40 times this number will be seriously injured. The vast majority of these deaths and injuries, some 90 per cent, will occur in developing countries. In most poor countries “death by traffic” is a bigger killer than malaria or tuberculosis. Road accidents kill more children aged between 5 and 14 than malaria or HIV/Aids, and are the biggest killer of 15 to 29-year-olds. Every day road accidents cause a loss of life equivalent to ten jumbo jet crashes. And while road deaths are falling in rich countries, they are spiralling up in the developing world, and will double by 2030 if no action is taken.

The threats associated with roads greatly outweigh those posed by terrorism. Had someone shown me the numbers when I was at Nato, I would have assumed that I was looking at the impact of a high-intensity conflict. And I might have expected campaigns for humanitarian intervention. Yet for the most part, governments and aid agencies turn a blind eye.

The world’s roads appear a matter of peripheral concern — a subject for a convention of civil engineers maybe, far from the global political agenda. Today at the UN in New York, however, there will be a rare departure from the norm. The UN’s member states will have a chance to approve proposals for a Decade of Action for Road Safety.

BACKGROUND

The Decade of Action is an opportunity to tackle this humanitarian crisis that is destroying lives on a vast scale.

Our neglect rests on two fallacies. The first is that road injuries are the collateral damage of development — an inevitable consequence of more roads and cars. This type of unthinking fatalism costs lives. Tens of thousands of children die each year because transport planners route major highways between their homes, often in informal slums, and their schools. If you want a glimpse of the reality behind the numbers, imagine sending your seven-year-old on a daily journey to school that involves negotiating a six-lane highway. The solution: build overpasses and regulate future road design to avoid human settlements.

The main killers are easy to identify: road designs that fail to separate pedestrians from vehicles, failure to enforce laws on speeding, drink- driving and the wearing of seatbelts and helmets. It’s not rocket science.

The second fallacy is more pernicious. It is an unspoken assumption that rising deaths are an affordable price for national progress. This view combines indefensible ethics with illiterate economics. Global numbers can never capture the grief and suffering behind every fatality and injury statistic — there is no price on human grief. But the wider consequences of neglecting road traffic injury do come with a price tag.

Road crashes cost poor countries between 1 and 3 per cent of GDP a year. Health systems are haemorrhaging resources on a vast scale. In countries such as India, Kenya and South Africa, up to half the beds in high-cost trauma wards are occupied by road traffic victims. The question that finance ministers should ask is not whether road safety is affordable, but whether any country can afford not to act.

"Stop Crime-Say Hello" say:

Murders between people who know each other account for 82% of all our countries murders. Only 18% of our nation’s murders happen as a result of hijacking, or broadly speaking, ‘robbery’.