MINISTER OF TRANSPORT, MR DULLAH OMAR, AT THE LAUNCH OF NATIONAL ROAD SAFETY AWARENESS WEEK

Kyalami, Thursday 2 November 2000

Thank you very much for the privilege you have accorded me by inviting me to today's event. It is again a pleasure for me to be addressing this important gathering of knowledgeable road safety practitioners.

But an event like this is not just an occasion for preaching to the converted. It's an opportunity to spread the message wider, and convince some of the more stubborn doubters who continue to threaten life and limb on our roads. In this regard I'd like to thank the media for their presence here. You play a crucial role in getting the safety message across, both through the power of your visuals and by giving air-time to the testimony of our invited celebrities.

There's no substitute for real life demonstration of some of the key points we are always making about unsafe road usage. Speeding, drinking and driving, fatigue, trailer "hook up" and pulling, and cellular phone handling are some of the major contributing causes to the carnage on our roads. The tests you are about to see will play an important role in dramatising their negative effects on a driver's ability to drive safely and correctly.

Last Friday, the 27th October, I was honoured to attend the National Driver of the Year competition at Woodmead, whose main objective is to encourage skillful and responsible driving by professional drivers of heavy commercial vehicles. To me the competition proved that there is a steadily growing number of operators out there who are concerned about improving the skills and attitudes of their drivers. I want to commend the companies that participated in the competition and hope that many more will participate in future, fully recognising the value of the exercise.

By including in today's tests the negative effects of both alcohol and fatigue, you are touching on two of the most critical aspects of driver fitness. Your event therefore slots in well with the dual theme of vehicle and driver fitness which runs over the period from 29 October to 9 December this year.

To raise public consciousness more sharply in the run-up to the festive season, my Department and the Provincial Departments of Transport, using the framework of Arrive Alive, have earmarked the 5th to the 11th of November 2000 as National Road Safety Awareness Week. All the provincial Departments have already prepared detailed plans that will involve hard-hitting communication and educational messages, backed up by targeted law enforcement activities.

I want to invite all of you - not just those directly involved in the transport industry, but from all our different sectors and areas of business activity - to contribute to this week by engaging in activities that will highlight road safety.

The road safety week will be a platform that will help to get every stakeholder to do something about the promotion of road safety. We are looking forward to a much more exciting, varied and high-profile campaign this time around, involving Government Ministers, churches, civil society, operators and a wide range of business organisations.

As we kick off the summer holiday campaign, we will not only focus on detecting offences and issuing summonses to people who break the law. We will be going all out to educate, persuade and create the positive consciousness that leads to voluntary compliance with the law. The educative effect of events like today's is an integral part of this process and cannot be under-estimated. We need to do this kind of thing often, driving home the key safety points again and again, in ways that road users can see with their own eyes and relate to in an active way.

There are many other road safety aspects that we have identified that continue to compromise our efforts to improve the behaviour and attitudes of road users.

These aspects are addressed in our Strategy 2000-2004 discussion document, but today I would like to focus very briefly on some of the main issues relating to driver fitness.

We begin by attacking this issue in the critical area of heavy freight and public passenger transport. We are going to radically upgrade the quality and status of the professional driving permit by adding a compulsory practical test to the existing 2-yearly theoretical test and making the practical test significantly tougher than the current requirements for a Code 14 licence under the K-53 system. We also want to make it complusory for first-time applicants for the PrDP to complete an accredited advanced/defensive driving course prior to application for the permit, and for existing PrDP holders to go through such a test as a refresher exercise every 4 years.

In addition to this, we are going to develop and implement a more stringent annual medical test to cover matters such as screening for drugs and the presence of identified medical conditions that can compromise a professional driver's ability to drive with the high degree of safety that is essential when transporting precious human lives, heavy loads or dangerous goods.

The other main areas that Strategy 2000-20004 addresses are the following:

• Restructuring the inspectorate for Driver Licence Testing Centres and Vehicle Testing Stations to ensure adequate staffing resources, technical and forensic skills and the required legal powers to act decisively against malpractice.
• A programme for rapid upgrading of non-compliant Driver Licence Testing Centres and Vehicle Testing Stations has already begun, and this will increasingly be accompanied by an all-out war on fraud and corruption.
• At the front end of the licensing process, two major developments are in the pipeline to ensure that we win this war:
• Firstly - driving schools are going to have to meet strict formal criteria for accreditation, and both driving schools and instructors will have to meet clearly specified standards for their re-registration every two years, under a stringent national iection regime;
• Secondly - starting next year, we will be piloting a computerised learners licence testing system. This will largely automate the administration of the learners test, minimising scope for fraudulent human intervention in the process, while at the same e making the test more user-friendly for disadvantaged applicants through the use of touch-screen and audio-visual technology.
• We are also looking at revising the K-53 driving test itself, to ensure that it is as accessible as possible to all applicants and that it is testing the right road-user and driver skills in the right ways.
• A concerted national campaign has already begun to stamp out overloading of both freight and passenger transport vehicles, and this will be greatly intensified over the next couple of years, with the help of public-private sector partnerships around thntroduction of state-of-the-art weigh-in-motion technology.

The final issue is ensuring that we remove unfit and unsafe vehicle from our roads, through a combination of enforcement, regulation and the compulsory introduction of proven vehicle safety technologies.

In conclusion, let me say this. We all know that there is a hard road ahead. But we have already moved far beyond lamenting the difficulties we face. We are acting, and we are drawing on the deep resources of cooperation and goodwill that have already made their presence felt over the last six months of intensive consultation and feedback around Strategy 2000-2004.

The road we now find ourselves on is an exciting and challenging one. I invite you to walk it with me until we begin to see our collective efforts translated into the really deep cuts in the rates of death and serious injuries that are our overriding goal.

I am absolutely convinced that we have got ourselves onto the right track - and that this is a war that can and will be won.

I thank you, and Arrive Alive.