Every year more than 12,000 people are killed on South Africa’s roads. In November the Automobile Association of South Africa launched its Think Before You Drive campaign which aims to draw peoples’ attention to simple but potentially live saving messages designed to enhance road safety in South Africa.
The AA has teamed up with Bridgestone for the campaign, which is also sponsored by the FIA Foundation. Speaking at a media conference at the start of the campaign, Managing Director of the AA, Ed Kok, called it “the single biggest road safety campaign ever launched.” Bridgestone Chairman and CEO, Yasuhiro Ito, said:
Our safety record in South Africa is nothing to be proud of and it will get worse as more and more people have access to motor vehicles….If we can persuade more drivers and passengers to wear their seat belts, use child restraints, and check head rests and tyres, then we can prevent thousands of unnecessary injuries and deaths.
The campaign was rolled out in four stages, each stage concentrating on a single road safety message. The first stage, focusing on tyre pressure, urged motorists to regularly check the tread depth on their vehicles. The AA also called on all petroleum companies to insist that their franchises safeguard the motoring public by ensuring that tyre gauges are both available to motorists and reliable. AA spokesman Gary Ronald voiced concern that some motorists are travelling several kilometres on wrongly inflated tyres because pressure testers are not being properly maintained: “Petrol station operators have a moral and commercial obligation to their customers, the road users, to ensure that this vital road safety check can be undertaken accurately, using simple and reliable equipment.” he said.
The second safety message urged car passengers to always wear a seatbelt. Currently, 40 people die on South Africa’s roads every day. This is the equivalent of 34 passenger planes, each carrying 292 passengers, crashing with no survivors each year. Such carnage could be prevented if people took the time to fasten their seatbelt before each and every car journey.
A spot check survey carried out by the AA found that 48% of drivers and front seat passengers do not belt up and only 8% of rear seat passengers wear seatbelts. The Think Before You Drive campaign aims to change this by highlighting the dangers of not wearing a seatbelt. Campaign organisers pointed out that, even at 50 km/h, an average sized adult who is propelled forwards on a sudden stop assumes the killing power of a small elephant. Gary Ronald commented that “the seat belt has been one of the greatest contributions to road safety, now we need the government to convince and educate the sceptical and lazy of that.”
The third message being promoted by the Think Before You Drive campaign in South Africa focuses on the importance of ensuring a properly adjusted head restraint. Whiplash injuries cost the country an estimated 2.4 billion Rand a year, a cost than can be avoided simply by having a correctly positioned head restraint. By educating people as to the correct positioning for a head rest, i.e. level with the top of the head and as close as possible to the back of the head, the painful and often long lasting effects of whiplash can be avoided.
The final campaign message focuses on child seats and gives advice to parents and drivers to ensure child safety seats and restraints are fitted correctly. A spot check survey carried out by the AA as part of the campaign found that two thirds of child safety seats are fitted incorrectly and more that 50% of children were totally unrestrained. The findings are alarming. AA Spokesman Gary Ronald said, “Thousands of parents are putting their children’s lives at risk by incorrectly fitting child seats or, worse still, not using restraints at all. Every driver with children in the car should take a few moments to check they are properly restrained before setting off. This could be the difference between life and death in a collision.”
Throughout the campaign in South Africa, booklets explaining basic, life-saving road safety tips were handed out to motorists who were also offered a free tyre safety check and tyre pressure/tread depth gauge.