ROAD TRAFFIC & SAFETY ENGINEERING

The Road Traffic and Safety Engineering Unit is responsible for traffic engineering activities within the road traffic environment, ensuring efficient and effective coordination among the three spheres of government in order to reduce fragmentation on the roads.

The key functions of the unit are as follows:

To identify and implement traffic and road safety engineering technological interventions.
To address the problem areas within road safety with regard to freight transport, viz. overloading and abnormal loads.
Eliminate high risk roads and hazardous locations.
Improve the standards of road design to ensure that all road users are given adequate protection and information with special focus on Vulnerable Road Users (VRUs), especially pedestrians.
Ensure that road design is forgiving, thus allowing motorists to recover from error, or to incur least harm when a crash is inevitable.
Ensure the inherent safety (safety by design) in the provision of new and upgraded road infrastructure. Develop road safety auditor, road safety assessment and road safety engineering capacity.
Develop a culture of road safety among those responsible for the delivery and maintenance of road infrastructure.
To intensify efforts to deal with inattentive, distracted driving and fatigue as a factor for consideration in road infrastructure design.
To intensify efforts to deal with speeding and determine appropriate speed limits.
Utilise technology to improve incident detection response and coordination.
To assess the distribution of emergency response for road infrastructure to be geospatially adapted where possible to ensure optimal access and response to incidents.