I know you’re still getting over the Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza, Return of the Wandering Goddess or, if you’re an atheist, nothing at all holidays but it’s time to start planning that Easter family driving adventure for you, your partner, the kiddies and your loved ones.
We’ve negotiated a special deal with our friends at Fontana Car Rental in Eritrea for a 1997 Toyota Corolla for only 800 Nakfa a day with 50km free. How good is that? Now you’re in the car, what do you need to know? For instance, why are we recommending Eritrea, the North Korea of Africa, as the adventure playground this year? Well, capital Asmara is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
“The capital of Eritrea developed from the 1890s onwards as a military outpost for the Italian colonial power. It is an exceptional example of early modernist urbanism at the beginning of the 20th century and its application in an African context,” UNESCO says.
Eritrea has been last on Reporters Sans Frontieres’ Press Freedom Index in eight out of the past nine years. A few years back, President Isaias Afwerki announced that his country didn’t need foreign journalists and local ones weren’t welcome either.
He shut down presses, radio and TV stations and rounded up journalists and put them in prison. Isaias hates tourists almost as much as he hates journalists. So, don’t expect a big warm welcome.
You will get a very warm welcome from our old friends diarrhoea, hepatitis A, typhoid fever, malaria and dengue fever, and mind the landmines and unexploded ordinance off the main roads. Oh, and I forgot to mention that the World Health Organisation calls Eritrea the world’s most dangerous place to drive.
In fact, you are eight times more likely to die in Isaias land than Australia. But in good news for drivers, 50 per cent of all the fatalities are pedestrians.
In 1970, Australia’s road toll wasn’t that far below Eritrea’s.
While its dropped over the past 47 years, we still only rank 14th on deaths per 100,000 of population.
There are three real answers to the road toll. Stop calling crashes accidents, stop blaming it all on drivers and treat distracted driving as an emergency, like we treated the need for seat belts and drink-driving laws.
Peter Norton, associate professor at the University of Virginia’s department of engineering, says the word accident was introduced into manufacturing in the 1900s, when companies wanted to get out of the costs of looking after the 30,000 workers killed and hundreds of thousands injured every year on the job.
Using accident in terms of road crashes means no one is to blame, something that can’t be controlled, certainly not the fault of governments or automakers.
When you drive you are part of a system that includes things like the condition of the road, the safety of the car, your attitude and that of the people around you, and police enforcement.
Importantly, it also includes the choices you have. In many of our big cities the poorer you are the less choices you have in terms of transport. Even residents in new middle class suburbs have to drive because there is no alternative. Governments love building roads because tarmac doesn’t scream. Voters do scream when trains, trams and buses are overcrowded or don’t run on time.
We have too many trucks on the road and too many unsafe ones because of the strong truck lobby, and many self-employed drivers are screwed by customers.
Of course, some drivers are to blame. But often the killed and injured are the victims of another driver and often other factors play a big part.
Cars were inherently unsafe before the 1970s. In 1970, mandatory seat belts started the drop in the road toll, as did child restraints, improved brakes, tyres, lights, indicators and glazing, head restraints and impact resistance. In 1976, random breath testing was bad news for pubs and clubs, good news for the road toll.
Peter Norton says that, just like drink driving was an emergency, the current emergency is distracted driving: “There’s a reason the road toll is starting to go up again.”
He believes attacking distracted driving like we attacked drink driving will make a big difference.
Lauchlan McIntosh is president of the Australasian College of Road Safety. He says “we don’t need any more road safety inquires, what we need is a politician to tell us why they couldn’t implement the many recommendations of past inquiries”.
He asks: “Why do the telcos and car companies encourage driver distraction, resulting in death and injury to their own customers? Why do the car, truck, bus, and motorbike manufacturers supply vehicles with lower specifications for some markets? Are their customers worth less in those different markets?
“Let’s set some road safety standards for all the billions spent on roads …. let’s have four-star roads for 80 per cent of the trafficked roads by 2030. The Infrastructure Australia CEO told me that road safety wasn’t on his agenda!”
As News motoring editor Richard Blackburn wrote last week: Talk to the police, “and they’ll tell you that incremental speed message is a furphy. They say most speeding-related fatalities involve very high speeds, and serial offenders, many of whom don’t even own a licence. Some estimate that the numbers of unauthorised drivers involved in fatal accidents could be as high as 50 per cent … despite this highway patrol police aren’t given access to a database of disqualified drivers.”
Talking of kiddies, make sure you start them as you would like them to finish. RM Sothebys is selling a child’s Jaguar E-Type roadster. Underneath is a 50cc engine good for 40km/h, hydraulic disc brakes, a quick-release steering wheel, working headlights, a carbon-fibre floor pan, and it’s yours for $40,000.
