Clearly the current visible, passive policing approach isn’t working. The recent spate of road deaths confirms this.

Merely driving around with blue lights flashing creates a “law abiding” environment in the vicinity of the police vehicle and nowhere else. It’s time for those blue lights to be switched off and some “active” policing necessary.

There are a few small things that will make a big difference.

The fixed cameras at intersections have made a huge difference, but now the racing and speeding has moved to between camera intersections. Get out the handheld radar and do some speed checks or implement average speed checking between camera intersections.

Noise and speeding from cars and motorcycles seem to go together. Enforce noise control at random checks and make the speeding less exciting for the road racing community.

It’s not difficult to see that the youth are allowed to do as they please. Scooters and buzz bikes seem to be allowed on the public roads without silencers, helmets or registration plates. If we don’t create a culture of road safety from an early age, we’ll see more and more crashes and fatalities. Lack of law enforcement is directly related to incidents.

Motorcycles without visible registration plates: A person who removes his registration plate or tucks it out of sight under his mudguard doesn’t plan to stick to the rules. There’s even a device which flips the motorcycle registration plate out of sight. Surely this isn’t legal? And it’s easy to police this.

Cell phone usage whilst driving seems to be unpoliced. Even the delivery scooters are a menace on the road with their mobiles strapped to handlebars and their approach to doing business on the move.

There’s a complete lack of random checking. Licence, seatbelts, helmets, roadworthiness, insurance, drinking and driving are easy to police and policing these will go a long way to improve safety on our roads.

Anaki Za