Was the Easter road death toll as low as we thought?
If you were following road news reports this week you might have come across a few contradicting reports to do with the Easter weekend’s road death toll.
Death toll reports
While some reports suggested that road officials had seen a positive drop in road deaths others reported on apparent havoc and chaos leading to an unacceptable number of fatalities on South Africa’s roads.
Mixed signals
It seems that there’s been some confusion over the Easter weekend’s road statistics after it was reported that stats were still being collected from across the country on Tuesday.
The Road Traffic Management Corporation spokesman Simon Zwane indicated that the stats released earlier this week were not final and that that was why the Department of Transport had called them preliminary in the first place.
Why the confusion?
A 75% decrease was initially reported for the Western Cape road death toll. However information was later released in the Western Cape legislature that 21 people had died on the roads over the Easter weekend, which was significantly more than the initial numbers given (6).
“But I hasten to add there is always a lower fatality rate when Easter falls before month end. When it falls after month end, socio-economic factors come into play where people tend to go away with money and decide to booze up, which leads to horrific crashes,” Howard Dembovsky, national chairman of the Justice Project South Africa explained.