Road safety marketing fiasco

And the reason for this is that the country's road safety authorities continue to avoid employing tried and trusted marketing principles to persuade the bulk of our population to stop trying so hard to kill themselves.

Interestingly enough, there's very little being said about the once much vaunted Arrive Alive this year. My feeling is its because Arrive Alive has simply given up, having virtually admitted last year that there was nothing they could do about bad road behaviour.

And once again there has been, particularly from Kwa-Zulu Natal, a lot of tub thumping about zero tolerance and how thousands upon thousands of traffic cops will be visible on our roads.

No visible policing

Once again, it's my bet that visible policing will be few and far between and it is almost certain that we will have a repeat of last year's fiasco when a completely unroadworthy passenger bus, literally held together with string and wire and with no brakes, managed to cover about 2000 Kms of busy South African highways in peak holiday season without being noticed by any traffic cops.

The problem in the past is that Arrive Alive and road safety campaigns have been preaching the obvious. Banging on and on and on about how speed kills. A complete lack of marketing has been evident in these naive messages that every single driver on our roads fervently believes is meant for someone else.

Marketing is all about getting a whole lot of elements to all work together. A far cry from the uncoordinated bits and pieces of road safety our various provinces try from time to time.

It works in Oz

And the people who produce these money and time-wasting communications campaigns always argue that they "work so well in Australia". Of course they do, but what our people don't seem to realise is that road safety campaigns work in Australia because the advertising campaigns are joined at the hip with extremely strict policing. It takes the two elements together to be effective.

This Christmas season it seems that road safety campaigns have been left to the liquor companies and their trite, politically correct messages exhorting South Africans not to drink and drive or even worse, drink "responsibly".

Whoever heard of anyone getting pissed responsibly for heaven's sake?

Meanwhile our road safety authorities continue to spend a massive amount of energy, time and money on what they see as beefing up road transport regulations instead of getting to grips with the real problems. And there are only two. The one is stopping traffic cops from taking bribes by paying them properly. And the second it to stop being obsessed solely with speed and bear in mind that there are other things that kill people, like overtaking on blind rises or solid white lines, jumping red robots, and driving at breakneck speed half a metre up the exhaust of the vehicle in front.

All about money

The trouble with our road safety campaigns and the reason for the complete lack of marketing expertise is that traffic control in this country is all about collecting revenue and only then about stopping people killing themselves. Trouble is there are only enough traffic cops to handle the revenue part so when it comes to stopping the killing they're always short staffed.

So our authorities avoid looking at the big picture and continue to try and cure cancer with very expensive pieces of Elastoplast.

Like the law requiring all trucks and trailers (as well as those private trailers we use to cart excess luggage on holiday) must have both sides and the rear covered with reflective tape as of this coming January 1st.

This tape costs a whopping R210 for six metres and as a result of the new laws commercial and private motorists will have to shell out roughly half a billion rand this month to make their vehicles legal.

No communications

In the meantime, there has been no public communication on this January the first date. Which in turn, means that all those thousands of holidaymakers who have been blissfully unaware of this new law, will all get whacked for a R350 fine as they come back from their holidays in early January.

Just more proof that road safety in this country is all about money.

And that marketing in this case will lose money for all those provinces instead of making any. That's why they all ignore it.