| A new African Road Assessment Programme which aims to measure the safety of African roads was launched at the FIA Foundation’s International Policy Forum in Cape Town.
It is part of the International Road Assessment Programme (iRAP) which has been running since April 2006. The iRAP involves a global team working with clubs, governments and local agencies to conduct road inspections across several continents.
John Dawson, Chairman of iRAP said: "We need to identify the high risk roads across Africa. We must steer aid towards the roads where people are dying in large numbers just because there are no footpaths, safe crossing points or safety fences”.
One possible starting point for the new African programme is the Beira Corridor, which is one of the main transport routes in southern Africa. The Corridor is a 3,500 km stretch of roads linking Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Angola.
Africa’s road assessment programme will be based on a pilot scheme run by iRAP and the Automobile Association South Africa (AASA). During the pilot, road inspections were made in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province from March to April 2007. The inspections covered a variety of road types and involved the use of a special vehicle fitted with video assessment technology supplied by German automobile club ADAC.
In total, the inspections covered 2,100 km of roads representing approximately four per cent of the country’s paved roads. Results of the inspections will be published in September 2007.
Dawson said that there has been support from the African automobile clubs for the new programme. He said: “The African clubs are anxious that we plan for the future and they want to make progress. We need a programme for the future, run in Africa for Africa and not by outside experts.”
Petro Kruger, Corporate Affairs Manager for the AASA said that an assessment programme is desperately needed as even in South Africa accurate figures on road deaths are not available.
As she put it: “We don’t have a detailed picture of road crashes. When a crash happens, we don’t know to what extent it’s a fault of the driver or the road. They say here that only five per cent of crashes are due to road conditions but if it were properly assessed we would see that surely road conditions play an important part.” |
