The festive season is known for two things – annoying Christmas carols in shopping malls, and road fatalities.

There’s something else about divine birth, roast dinner, drunk relatives and capitalism, but we won’t go into that now.

Every year, road deaths increase over the silly season as people abandon all recollection of how to drive and launch themselves onto the roads.

This year, however, overall festive season road fatalities were down 6% (from 262 t0 246). There was also a notable decrease in pedestrian deaths (down from 104 to 91).

These numbers were measured between December 1, 2018, and January 31, 2019.

The reason, reports BusinessTech, is Smart Enforcement Technology interventions.

Western Cape Transport MEC, Donald Grant, notes that this past festive season “a full complement of smart enforcement technologies were deployed across the province” for the first time, in an effort to assist traffic officials in “increasing compliance and saving more lives on our roads”.

These interventions include:

• Handheld devices which have enabled officials to have direct roadside access to verify the validity of driving and motor vehicle licences, professional driving permits, speeding offences at all our Average Speed Over Distance sites across our province (with 490 Provincial Traffic and 40 trainee traffic officer students trained in the use of these devices);
• New vehicles fitted with automatic number plate recognition software dashcams. Other new in-vehicle technology includes live camera surveillance, new patrol radios, vehicle tracking, and stolen vehicle monitoring.
• Average Speed Over Distance (ASOD) camera enforcement technology. This technology now covers over 450 km of the province’s busiest roads  and calculates the average speed of a vehicle travelling from one ASOD station to the next.
• Technological advancement to monitor drivers as part of a Fatigue Management Awareness Programme targeted at drivers travelling long distances. This intervention is primarily aimed at ensuring that the driver of a public transport vehicle has a total maximum of 15 hours driving time in a period of 24 hours, and a minimum continuous resting period of 8 hours within a 24-hour period.
• Three Mobile Alcohol Evidentiary Units deployed at strategic locations across the province to aid our successful Random Breath Testing (RBT) operations. These units can collect evidence next to the side of the road for use in criminal prosecutions.

In other words, if you plan on driving drunk or like an idiot (the two aren’t mutually exclusive), there’s smart tech out there that will take you down.

Best take an Uber.

[source:businesstech]