Walk – Don’t Walk

60% of pedestrians at Monte Christo Road do not make use of pedestrian crossings

As part of its pedestrian crash risk awareness campaign, employees of the Motor Vehicle Accident Fund in collaboration with traffic officers from the Windhoek City Police, held a pedestrian road safety intervention along the Monte Christo Road on Tuesday this week.
As part of the intervention, the team crossed the road with pedestrians in order to show them the safest way in which to cross the road.
Speaking to the Economist this week, the acting manager: public education at MVA Fund, Eliphas Rukambe, said that Khomas region is one of the regions where the most pedestrian crashes have been recorded.
The Monte Christo Road is the most accident prone road, followed by Independence Avenue and the Western Bypass.
According to Rukambe, figures obtained by MVA indicated that there is a high number of accidents that have been recorded on that road.
“We went down on the ground to be able to observe for ourselves and see whether this road is really a problem or not. We started this campaign early in the morning at about 6:00 when the children are going to school and a number of people are going to work as well. We have seen that there is a high volume of people that are crossing from one point to the other and most of these people – 60% of these people – do not make use of the demarcated crossing point, they just cross the road at any point,” he said.
Rukambe further said that they have also seen that some people are jumping into vehicles whilst the vehicles are moving and other vehicles stopped in such a way that they obstructed pedestrians from properly using the pedestrian crossing.
“We also observed pedestrians that were very rude, meaning that even while we were standing there trying to direct people to the right point of crossing, they were just crossing and pushing us out of the way,” he said.
According to the MVA Call Center’s Pedestrian Crashes report, 552 pedestrian related accidents were recorded between January and August 2011, this includes the seriously injured and those who lost their lives. During the Xupifa Eemwenyo 2011/2012 campaign, 56 pedestrian accidents were reported.