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WE have just come out of another long holiday weekend and the depressing news is in: 37 people killed on the roads and more than 100 injured, at least badly enough to need medical attention.

These were killed in a range of small accidents, three people here, five people there. There were no major disasters, like a bus smashing into a truck, just a conglomeration of accidents, mostly involving cars although a truck full of church goers did slide down a slope and the odd kombi was involved in a crash. But for the deceased, it does not really matter how they died.

The absence of proper conventional buses in the statistics is, in one sense, continuing good news. A major effort by the Ministry of Transport and Infrastructural Development has been tackling this particular problem with a lot of practical measures and it now seems we are winning, the buses move people rather than kill people.

The measures include severe sanctions against bus companies when a driver is at fault, with operating licences suspended and the bus company stopped from operating any services until adequate internal safety measures have been put in place. With professional and highly qualified drivers, there should be no bus drivers causing accidents and that is now appearing. 

This does not mean that another driver will not cause an accident involving a bus, but does mean that even in these cases, the bus driver will know enough defensive driving to avoid the accident, or at least take action that minimises casualties. And as they are not speeding they have time to make the correct decisions.

Those severe operational standards have been backed by compulsory satellite monitoring of all buses, with the satellite feeds available to a staffed police unit that keeps an eye on these buses, to make sure that the bus companies are enforcing speed and other regulations.

Large haulage trucks are also rarely involved in accidents, and again with their drivers rarely at fault if they are. Most legitimate and licensed transporters now have satellite monitoring of their vehicles, largely for operational purposes, to make sure drivers do not take diversions for private hire or fail to take breaks at approved stops. They like to know where their trucks are, and the satellite monitoring has all but ended truck hijacking and other crimes.

But these heavy vehicles, buses and haulage trucks, are only a small fraction of the vehicles on the road, although when they are badly driven they cause the most severe accidents. Most vehicles are private cars and pick-ups and these are driven by ordinary drivers, most of whom have never heard of defensive driving and many being quite prepared to drive after spending time in a pub, or ready to take risks on the road, or ready to jump a red light or ready to assume the other driver will give way.

A holiday weekend will tend to have an even higher proportion of these non-professional drivers, or non-primary drivers as many companies call them, since there will be far more recreational driving. The professionals are often off duty on public holidays.

The police investigate every serious accident, and all accidents where someone is killed or seriously injured. While they do the routine investigation for insurance purposes to establish blame in the myriad of minor accidents, and charge the driver most to blame for driving without due care and attention with just a small fine, they look at more serious criminal charges when there is a dead body.

And despite the common misconception that faulty vehicles are to blame for a lot of accidents, almost every accident is caused by a driver making an error. Faulty vehicles tend to stop moving, rather than crashing. 

The rigid enforcement of traffic rules for buses, and the results we are now seeing, shows the way forward for the rest of the accidents. The police could do a lot more with some very modest equipment, such as speed traps and breathalysers. Some of this can be automated, remote-controlled speed traps and cameras as traffic lights for example, so limited staffing can be used against the actual offenders.

The traffic police built up a bad reputation over a couple of years before the Second Republic, but that corrupt activity rarely involved driving offences. And it is bad driving, not a missing fire extinguisher, that causes an accident.

What is now needed is enforcement of driving laws, with court appearances. Any driver involved in an accident should be automatically breathalysed and those over the limit taken to court and given the automatic one-year driving ban. Anyone more than say 10km/h or 20km/h over a speed limit, and anomalous sections of speed limits can be rectified, should be taken to court, with community service as the standard penalty. 

Richer people might just be irritated by a ZiG1 000 fine, but a week clearing verges in a community service gang would strike home and be far fairer than allowing the better off to basically escape with a fixed penalty and their insurer picking up the repair bills. 

We know from the action against bad driving of buses that such enforcement works, and statistics from those countries where action is taken shows that hitting hard against drinking and driving and against serious speeding does slash accident rates, simply because people stop taking chances. The objective of enforcement, as we now have with buses, is to stop bad driving, not collect money.

Car ownership is rising fast in Zimbabwe, as we become a better off country. Our roads are getting much better, allowing more unsafe driving as it becomes possible to drive at unsafe speeds and take more risks. The culture of almost staggering to your car after an evening of drinking is a killer, and we suspect that holiday accidents contain a higher proportion of drinking offences. 

We can have decent roads and the convenience of more private cars without having more funerals, but that means we all have to drive a lot better, become a lot more patient and courteous. Our laws are more than adequate, they just need to enforced. And they must if Vision 2030 is to be simply a long list of positives.