New bid to track SA road death causes

Transport officials are to clean up years of questionable data on South Africa's roads with a new crash information system slated for next year.

From April, various departments and government agencies will feed information on accident victims into a single portal managed by the Road Traffic Management Corporation (RTMC), an agency of the Department of Transport.

The Minister of Transport, Sbu Ndebele, was hammered this week for proposing to slash the national speed limit to 100km/h. Ndebele said excess speed was responsible for most of the carnage on the country's roads. But critics panned the statistics on which he based this.

Even RTMC boss Collins Letsoalo indicated on Friday that crash data supplied by the police was unreliable, saying: "I wouldn't put my head on a block that all of it is accurate."

Each year, the RTMC produces a road traffic report based on the information gathered at accidents by police, provincial authorities and municipalities.

The final product is used to develop strategies for making the country's roads safer.

This week, critics laid into Ndebele for suggesting a reduced freeway speed limit.

He based this on RTMC figures which showed high speed was to blame for 40% of fatal crashes. The same report found that less than 2% of deadly crashes were attributed to intoxication.

But National Injury Mortality Surveillance System numbers contradict these figures.

Compiled from mortuary data by the Medical Research Council, they indicate that at least 60% of fatal accidents are alcohol-related.

Despite this, Letsoalo said: "The minister is quite correct. I've been taken aback by the response from experts and watchdog organisations."

One of these has been Automobile Association spokes-man Gary Arnold.

He questioned the RTMC report, which he saw for the first time this week - even though the first page boasts an endorsement by the association, saying: "I'm not comfortable with the data. I would use it for trending purposes, rather than treating it as deadly accurate."

Arnold said any collision above 35km/h was potentially fatal, so the difference made by the minister's proposal would be "negligible".

According to the RTMC report, 10845 fatal crashes were recorded from April 2010 to March this year, marginally down from the previous year's total of 10948.