07 Jul 2024

The increase in pedestrian deaths is an indication that mobility on roads is a serious risk for pedestrians and other unprotected road users.

This was said by BoMaid managing director, Moraki Mokgosana during the 2nd Motor Vehicle Accident Fund Safe Mobility Challenge Road Safety campaign in Gaborone on Saturday.

He said pedestrian deaths had grown from 95 in 2019, which was 21 per cent of all fatalities to 126 in 2023, representing 32 per cent of total fatalities in 2023.

“This therefore is a call to address this challenge, but the promotion of road safety is a shared responsibility. We are all, as participants in the road transport system, responsible for our own safety and the safety of other road users,” he said.

Mokgosana said some of the fatal road traffic crashes were attributed to the failure by pedestrians and cyclists to observe good road usage.

He also said most pedestrian collisions happened at night when visibility was compromised, ‘especially while intoxicated’.  

He, however, said as much as most road traffic crashes were human behaviour-related, road safety was also a systemic issue.

“For us to achieve a drastic reduction in road traffic deaths, we need to apply systems thinking and adopt a systemic approach as custodians and designers of the road transport system,” he said.

He said countries that were successful in road safety had shifted from blaming it all on human behaviour to adopting ‘a safe systems approach model which transferred more responsibility for safety to system designers to incorporate safety at road planning and infrastructure design stages’.  

He said it was evidenced locally by the fact that most of the pedestrian crash hotspots were along roads that were adjacent to entertainment areas and busy shopping complexes with no safe pedestrian infrastructure.

He noted the Western-Bypass and the A12 road in Mogoditshane and their adjacent land use

“It is important that as a country that aspires to be among the high-economy class, we should also align with best practices in terms of road safety management,” said.

He said the United Nations Global Plan for Road Safety 2021-2030 recommended measures such as multi-modal transport and land-use planning as starting points for implementing an integrated safe system approach. Mokgosana also labelled road traffic crashes as huge socio-economic and health challenges which impeded sustainable development and economic transformation.

He commended the MVA Fund campaign for its focus on pedestrians and cyclist safety.

“It is a campaign that seeks to advocate for a culture of positive road use among road users and all of us as stakeholders,” he said.

He said the campaign was conceptualised after noting an escalating number of pedestrian deaths from motor vehicle collisions. Ends