2013 statistics shows that death by drunk drivers has now increased to nearly 12,000 deaths per year

WHO's "Global Status Report on Road Safety" 2013. Results as follows:

Deaths per 100 000 (As amended by WHO -using confidence estimated negative binomial regression models)

Sweden 3;UK 3.7;Australia 6.1;USA 11.4;India 18.9;China 20.5;Iraq 31.5;Iran 34.1;Venezuela 37.1;Thailand 38.1;Dominican Rep 41.7

AFRICA:;Mozambique 18.5;Malawi 19.5;Angola 23.1;Zambia 23.8;Botswana 20.8;Namibia 25;SOUTH AFRICA 31.9; Nigeria 33.7

SA enforcement figures:  Drink Driving 2/10;Seatbelts 2/10;child restraints 1/10;speed 3/10;Motorcycle helmets 6/10.

SADD ask for more random alcohol testing - morning, noon and night- 24 hrs-every day of the week- all yr- and not just at holiday periods.

SADD ask for establishment of "Drink Driving Courts" so drink drivers are tried and sentenced within 1 month of the incident.

SADD ask for all convicted drink drivers to automatically have Licence removal,& be sent for alcohol education and/or treament with properly trained addiction counsellors.

SADD asks for every driver to be tested for alcohol or drugs at every crash scene, and for all SAPS and Traffic Police to have screening breathalyzers in their vehicles

SADD ask for Traffic Officers to be on duty- 24/7,and especially at night and weekends when most crashes happen.

SADD asks for "accidents" to be called "crashes"- as per UNs recommendation- because they happen for a reason eg drink driving/speed/unsafe overtaking/unroadworthy cars etc- so it is not just an "accident" they happen.

Crashes happen all year - not just at Christmas or Easter.

Traffic Officers and Police need to be active and visible all year round.

MEC Robin Carlisle @ ChildSafe AGM on 19.8.12 said:

"It is sobering to note that our record of road deaths and crashes as a country is very poor. I estimate that close to 18 000 people die on South Africa's roads every year. It is also sad to see that as a country, we have come to accept the prevalence of road carnage as part of our daily lives. This shouldn't be the case. Road crashes are violent, unnecessary and most importantly, avoidable. Through our Safely Home campaign, we continue to target road safety issues in an aim to reduce the number of people killed on the province's roads by 50% by 2014.

One of the key factors in changing inappropriate behaviour on our roads is imposing adequate consequences. In the Western Cape, and in the City of Cape Town, we have impound cellphones from drivers caught using them while driving, conducted vehicle inspections through our roadblocks, implemented The Average Speed Over Distance cameras (ASOD), that calculate the average speed of a vehicle from the time it passes the first camera until it passes the second camera (leading to a drop in the number of drivers arrested for doing excessively high speeds), conduct fatigue management roadblocks targeted at long distance public transport, the Western Cape is the only province which publishes the names of convicted drunk drivers through our Name and Shame project; to name a few. These have been successful in changing behaviour on our roads.

We continue to target irresponsible and reckless drivers on our roads in the stern action that we take. It is interesting to note however, that roughly 94% of killers on the road are men, while they constitute 61% of all drivers. Children, as a group, have not been immediately visible in the past when implementing measures that reduce our fatalities on our roads. This will no longer be the case.

The statistics relating to pedestrian deaths are startling. In 2011, The Red Cross Children's hospital admitted 752 children involved in crashes as pedestrians."

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)

Road TrafficManagement Corporation (RTMC) / Department of Transport (DoT)

"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’.