25 Feb 2019

Road safety audits help in improving road safety, especially during road planning and designing stages.

Speaking at a week-long road safety audit workshop in Palapye that was held by Botswana Transportation Technology Transfer Unit (T2) under the Faculty of Engineering Technology at the University of Botswana (UB) in collaboration with International Road Federation (IRF), the latter’s vice president, Mr Mike Dreznes from USA stressed the importance of prioritising and applying best possible safety measures at the design stages, adding that when constructing roads, state of the art technologies must be applied.  

He said that most of the roads in Botswana lacked safety features.

“To improve road safety and reduce road accidents speed management has to be a prioritised at dangerous zones, by narrowing lanes or road dieting and using rumble stripes on road median,” he said.

He added that using brighter colours on roads increases visibility and texture lines give a feeling of taking precautions, while increased friction at intersections causes deceleration of vehicles, hence decreasing the braking and stopping distance.

Furthermore, he noted that road safety needs to be improved to avoid the same mistakes repeated by local motorists.

“Education, enforcement, engineering, emergency services and evaluation are the major keys to improving road safety. If applied well, road accidents could be highly reduced or eliminated,” he said.

Mr Dreznes called for improvement of road intersections and continuous road safety campaigns using icons and celebrities.

He appealed to the relevant stakeholders to develop national road safety councils, national guidelines for vulnerable road users, speed management programmes in school zones and education programmes for all age levels.

He said government should also use state of the art technologies at crossroads.  

T2 manager, Ms Portia Tapa said the main reason for the seminar was to sensitise stakeholders and the public about road safety issues.

She said road accidents were the second causes of death in Botswana and have high expenses or implications of about P5 million on government annually.

“In Botswana, there is a problem of auditing road safety, there is a lack of experts who have the know-how on how to go about the audit because there is no policy for it,” she said.

“The last road safety audit was done in 2015 and the government is still evaluating it, but technology and safety measures improve every day,” she said.

Ms Tapa said T2 would present recommendations on road safety and construction issues for short and long terms for the Ministry of Transport and Communications to act upon and improve road safety to save lives.

She said easier and cheaper ways of refurbishing the roads like repainting road markings and replacing knocked down road signs should not take much time to attend to.

She expressed concern that some government departments did not utilise funds allocated to them for projects and return the allocated moneys for developments to the government coffers at the end of financial years, while there is still infrastructure such as roads and technologies that needed to be developed.

Botswana Police Traffic Division, Botswana Railways, DTRS, and Department of Roads, road engineers from the district council and representatives from the University of Botswana attended the seminar. ENDS