Effect of visibility on the occurrence of pedestrian motor vehicle collisions and injuries: a literature review.

Drive Alive is a NGO that aims to fill gaps in road safety education left by the South African National Department of Transport. Drive Alive visits areas identified as hazardous locations, but not serviced by the NDOT. Drive Alive obtains statistics from the Central Office of Statistics and scientific knowledge is obtained from the CSIR. Motor vehicle accidents are the single greatest cause of unnatural deaths amongst South African children aged 5 to 19 years. More than 1100 children under 19 years die on our roads annually. 50 per cent of all road accidents involve pedestrians. The Global Road Safety Partnership under the auspices of the World Bank chose Drive Alive's Pedestrian Visibility Campaign as its number one priority project in September 2000. The campaigners' main objectives are to educate the public on road safety, to advocate for legislation making it compulsory for all school uniforms to be reflectorized, to increase pedestrian visibility and, to increase signage on public roads. It is the intention of Drive Alive to create pockets of excellence in each of the 9 provinces in South Africa. Eldorado Park in Gauteng is an example of such an area. The success of this project has alerted the government to the needs of the people in this area and now the South African National Roads Agency is involved in upgrading the road infrastructure to the tune of R9 million. Drive Alive has started in an area in Mpumalanga, north of Pretoria and intends going to areas identified by researchers in the other 9 provinces. Drive Alive aims to conscientise the community, educate the primary school children and then deliver to each child a tool, which in this case is a refectorized backpack. The primary aim of this paper is to compare, explore and assess effect of visibility on the occurrence of pedestrian motor vehicle collisions and injuries and to describe pedestrian visibility education as a possible solution to the occurrence of pedestrian motor vehicle collisions and injuries. This paper further seeks to describe the importance of pedestrian visibility education to minimize the occurrence of pedestrian motor vehicle collisions and injuries by making use of Eldorado Park as an example (A). For the covering abstract of the conference see E217780.