A majority of buses in South Africa do not feature seatbelts, presenting a major risk to all commuters that rely on these services.
This was highlighted by Dr Lee Randall, Independent Road Safety Researcher and Cofounder of the Road Ethics Project, who recently spoke on 702 to discuss the dangers involved with the country’s public transport options.
Unsafe conditions
Randall explained that public transport vehicles such as buses are exempt from seatbelt regulations, which apply to virtually every other car on public roads.
Midsize buses and minibus taxis registered after September 2006 are expected to provide seatbelts for every seated occupant, but this regulation does not apply to larger municipal buses.
She also cautioned that South Africa already has a shockingly low compliance rate for seatbelt use by global standards, which means that the application of seatbelts is nearly as bad in other forms of public transport as it is for the buses that don’t have them in the first place.
“We as a society seem to not realize that seatbelts can literally halve deaths and serious injuries and we don’t take them seriously,” she said.
These comments were made following a recent high-profile crash in South Africa, when a Ekurhuleni municipal bus lost control and flipped on a highway near O.R. Tambo International Airport in Gauteng.
Department of Transport spokesperson Collen Msibi confirmed that 12 passengers died at the scene and that another four later succumbed to their injuries in hospital.
Another 11 were critically injured, and 24 other sustained moderate to serious injuries, illustrating how many people can be affected in a single bus accident, especially since none of the passengers had seatbelts that could have kept them in place as the bus flipped.
Dr Randall also brought up the matter of driver competence, which ties into South Africa’s lacklustre licence requirements.
She explained that the standard K53 driver assessment focuses on technicalities and that drivers tend to memorize the criteria to pass without internalizing the safety reasoning behind it.
Corruption also allows unqualified individuals to slip through the cracks, and law enforcement could be doing a much better job of taking these offenders off the roads.
That being said, Randall expressed that it is not only the duty of traffic police to improve road safety, saying that South Africa’s driving culture needs to shift so individuals become more ethical and aware of the consequences that their actions can have for other road users.
Loading ...
