Ward based community road safety performance benchmarking, monitoring and intervention programmes in the City of Johannesburg

Abstract

The current road safety situation in the City of Johannesburg is a major concern to the city authority. More than 120 000 road accidents (on average about 330 accidents per day) occur every year leading to about 600 fatal and 16 000 injury accidents. In 2005, road accidents were costed at R8, 5 billion. Pedestrian accidents are a major feature of the problem, representing about 60 per cent of all fatalities. A large proportion of these fatalities occur on the higher order roads such as freeways and distributor roads but also on residential streets. Until now, the approach to address the problem has been two-fold by focussing on the identification of hazardous locations based on accident records and, secondly to conduct road safety assessments on the existing road network. The city management decided to broaden its strategy to reduce the road carnage on the City's roads by also focussing on the inputs of local communities through the development of a ward based community road safety performance benchmarking, monitoring and intervention programme. Community road safety needs in the respective wards are articulated through the ward councillor. The rationale is that the community exactly knows where these problem areas are, because they suffer as a result thereof. The benefits of this approach are multiple. It allows specific road safety problem areas to be highlighted in communities by the community members, and also provides a benchmarking and monitoring mechanism so that the service delivery and performance levels of the ward councillors to address the problem can be properly monitored. The paper describes the process followed to activate the community based road safety programme. In essence the process consists of the following activities: the encouragement of community participation in identifying road safety problems in the community; the empowerment of all stakeholders to deal with the road safety problem, this includes the councillors and the public; the development of integrated information systems to capture the details and dynamics of each ward; the establishment of scientific decision-making tools to measure individual ward road safety performance; and the application of a multi-disciplinary approach to planning, implementation and evaluation of the road safety problem communities are confronted with. The paper also illustrates how the community road safety programme are designed to used web-based technology and how it could be linked to the CSIR's NyendaWeb, a research platform development programme