The City of Cape Town will be engaging national government, the provincial government and the freight and logistics industry to find safer traffic solutions around heavy duty vehicles following last week’s horror crash in which a container truck overturned near the M5 exit, landing on top of a passenger vehicle.
This according to mayoral committee member for safety and security, JP Smith, who told FTW that the City would be “negligent” not to re-evaluate its current safety approach after an incident where three people, including the truck driver, lost their lives.
“But we also don’t want to implement intervention simply to say we intervened. We need the right intervention measures in place that don’t affect economic growth,” Smith said, adding that this was why industry engagement on this matter was crucial.
“I have heard from several logistics operators that one of the key factors in truck accidents of this nature is driver competency. Most accidents are caused by human failure not mechanical failure,” he commented, highlighting that truck operators had confided in him that skilled drivers were very hard to find.
According to Smith, this often leads to reckless driving and speeding. “We therefore call on the logistics industry to get in touch with our office so we can develop solutions together – whether it be stricter or more regular driver testing, or the funding of more driver training and testing centres,” he said
Despite an earlier news report by one of the dailies claiming that Smith had reiterated the need for trucks to be banned on the roads during peak times, he denied this. “Truck banning is one of the proposals by national government but we are also aware of the economic impact this could have.”
Furthermore, since it seems that driver competency is one of the root causes, it would merely postpone the problem, cause more congestion at offpeak times, and accidents would still take place, Smith pointed out.
“Furthermore, it would just mean that if trucks were banned from national highways at certain times the drivers would simply take the smaller roads and the same problems would occur there.”
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Most accidents are caused by human failure, not mechanical failure. – JP Smith
