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Last year 144 people were killed on our roads during the Christmas-New Year holidays and a lot more were injured. So scores of families marked Christmas Day with a trip to the mortuary to identify a dead family member, or were sitting in hospitals waiting for the doctors to give good or bad news.

And then there were those who spent their Christmas in a police station, giving evidence of how and why they had killed or injured someone else’s children through driving stupidly.

This is not what Christmas, with its emphasis on family reunion, or New Year, with its emphasis on making a new start in a better year, are all about.

The Zimbabwe Traffic Safety Council have the statistics. At least 94 percent of all road accidents in Zimbabwe are the result of driver error and even many of the other six percent are the result of human negligence: forgetting to check tyres, forgetting to have a spare headlight bulb in the car, insisting on driving late at night on a wet road when sensible people would be off the road and even refusing to stop for a few minutes to clean a windscreen so you can see.

So the campaign the council has launched this festive season with police and vehicle inspection depots makes sense and all motorists should support it. The aim is modest, to halve the death toll. But 72 bodies in a fortnight is still a lot of funerals, a lot of court cases and lot of people in hospital.

The biggest killer arises from impatience, a desire to finish a journey quickly. So people speed, people take serious risks in overtaking, people do not stop and rest, people drive at night and even worse drive at night on wet roads, people tailgate the car in front, people try to drive after drinking half the night at a party, people shoot through red lights and stop signs.

If everyone simply accepted that a journey takes a bit of time and that with simple planning it can be driven safely in that needed time, then a lot of accidents simply would not happen. The lunatic drivers would behave safely; the people they kill would have the time needed to take appropriate defensive action when faced with someone else’s mistakes.

We note with approval that some police stations have managed to get speed traps in place, and even the threat of these can curb speeding, and that the traffic sections have put out more motorcycle patrols, a fairly cheap and effective way of enforcing road regulations. And now the traffic safety council are having rest areas on the major highways, places where a driver can stop for a short rest, get some advice and have their car checked.

Unfortunately, the most unsafe drivers will not be stopping, or at least not stopping voluntarily. They will want to continue at top speed and with their usual risky driving decisions.

This is a pity, since the idea is excellent and the council’s rest zones will be safe places to stop. We hope drivers will use them. Perhaps patrolling police, when seeing one of the dozens of minor infringements warranting a caution can back this up by demanding people go for their safety chat.

The weirdest thing about bad and unsafe driving is that there is very little gain. Tests around the world and anecdotal evidence in Zimbabwe, shows that the driver who goes with the flow, takes no risks and generally has a calm and careful journey arrives only a few minutes behind the man who speeds, does risky overtaking, bullies others and generally arrives in tense, sweaty state.

Simple mathematics shows that the person averaging 90km/h driving from Harare to Bulawayo takes a little over 5 hours, while the person averaging 110km/h, which means long stretches of speeding and no rest stops, does the journey just 45 minutes more quickly.

Yet both just need a morning or an afternoon, and the faster driver almost certainly is unfit for anything on arrival after such a difficult and tense drive.

So let us all think about our Christmas journeys, plan them properly and have as our aim not to kill anyone else or die ourselves.

It is possible.