Men prone to road crashes
Pini Bothoko | Monday August 15, 2022 06:00
Motorists’ attitudes towards key road safety issues such as speeding, drink and driving, and risky overtaking have been identified as major road safety concerns, especially amongst the youth.
As such, drivers have been encouraged to take precautions and be responsible at all times when behind the wheel.
In an interview, Divisional Traffic Officer for South Central, Assistant Commissioner, Reginald Matlhaba raised concern about escalating road accidents that continue to claim people’s lives especially male motorists.
He said severe accidents tend to occur involving men than women because male motorists are more likely to engage in risky driving when compared to their female counterparts.
“Road deaths mostly affect men and it is not like male drivers are many. We have observed that unlike women they do not pay attention to road sings and are more likely to engage in risky driving practices including not using seat belts, drink and driving and speeding,” Matlhaba said.
The senior traffic officer attributed most of the accidents to speeding and failure to observe road signs amongst drivers.
He called for sober driving, pointing out that alcohol affects drivers in many aspects including their attitude, judgement, vigilance and reaction time to mention but a few.
Matlhaba said most of the accidents occur over the weekends, on holidays and early in the morning between 2am and 4am when motorists are intoxicated and driving up and down between drinking holes in the Greater Gaborone.
He added some accidents occur due to fatigue after driving long distances at night while there are usually a number of social activities which lead to motorists driving up and down.
“They usually occur from Friday at around 7am to Sunday around 3am. Such attitudes that drivers continue to display increase their exposure to road accidents and casualty rates. Through our investigations we have observed that in South-Central district the mostly affected people are men, for example from January to December 2021 we recorded 131 road deaths with 94 of them being men and 37 were women,” Matlhaba said.
He stated that this year from January to end of July they recorded 64 deaths with 41 of them being men demonstrating males continue to loss their lives with high numbers due to fatalities. He said most of the time they were drivers while some were passengers and pedestrians whilst intoxicated.
Matlhaba said road deaths are also caused by over speeding. He said they to have established that a majority of young drivers have a habit of excessive speeding which risks other people’s lives.
“Some drivers (over)speed because it’s a habit while others speed claiming it’s because they fall behind in their daily schedules. In other instances they would claim they were rushing somewhere. Traffic reduces at night hence drivers having an advantage to speed unnecessarily despite being expected to drive at a maximum speed of 60km/h,” he said.
He said as a result every morning traffic lights, screen walls, electric poles would have been hit and damaged and some to have driven through circles whilst they are the same roads that they use on daily basis not roads that they are not familiar with.
However, Matlhaba said these road deaths affect the economy because government will be forced to fix those damaged traffic lights almost every week.
“This will affect the economy because traffic lights are hit and damaged every weekend and as a result there will be traffic congestion and people would not arrive on time to their destinations. In the process, parents, bread winners are lost and people sustain serious or permanent injuries that will cost government a lot of money to cover for their medicals that could be used to boost the country’s economy,” he said.
Matlhaba stated that in all of the accidents, of which some were head-on collisions, drivers and passengers sustained serious injuries that left some hospitalised.