Meet Cape’s safest school taxi driver
Kraaifontein taxi driver Peterus Wagner was awarded a 16-seater minibus this week for being the safest driver of schoolchildren in the Western Cape. Picture: Supplied Kraaifontein taxi driver Peterus Wagner was awarded a 16-seater minibus this week for being the safest driver of schoolchildren in the Western Cape. Picture: Supplied
Cape Town - A Kraaifontein taxi driver was awarded a 16-seater minibus this week for being the safest driver of schoolchildren in the Western Cape.
Peterus Wagner has been driving for more than 15 years, and was almost too nervous to attend the awards ceremony on Monday, but he knew he worked hard all year towards this.
“When I heard my name, I went mad,” he said. “It was an awesome feeling. The children are excited, I’m excited.”
Far from resting on his laurels, Wagner said being the winner means he needs to be a positive example to other drivers.
“I know I’ve won the vehicle now, so now my responsibility becomes more,” he said.
Wagner is one of 800 drivers who participate in the Safe Travel To School (STTS) initiative by NGO ChildSafe. Together with Discovery, ChildSafe fits each taxi with a tracker which monitors the speed, acceleration, braking and cornering of the driver,
and gathers data on how safely they drive.
Every three months, there is a prize-giving in which the safest drivers receive cash prizes between R500 and R3 000. At the end of the year, the grand prize-giving acknowledges the safest and most improved scholar transport drivers with R5 000 petrol vouchers and cash prizes of up to R20 000.
The winner receives a 16-seater Nissan Impedulo taxi, enabling them to keep the profits of their work instead of paying hiring fees to a taxi owner.
The Safe Travel To School programme began in 2015, spurred on by a horrific accident in which 10 school children were killed when a taxi jumped a level crossing in Blackheath and was hit by a train.
Project manager Marcella Naidoo said, in the beginning, ChildSafe’s prevention programmes focused on burns, but now, places a lot of attention on the prevalence of road accident trauma.
“It’s a leading killer of children, and therefore, we can’t ignore it,” Naidoo said. “A very long time ago, medical people realised that if they wanted to reduce the trauma victims and incidence of trauma, then we have to do some prevention.”
The Safe Travel To School programme not only incentivises taxi drivers to be safer on the road, but also to take care of their own health and learn new valuable skills. Drivers are offered eyesight testing to make sure their vision is perfect, and can also go on free first aid training and advanced driving courses.
Now in its fifth year, STTS has recruited, trained and tracked 800 drivers and the data shows a massive improvement in all indicators that the tracker measures, and not a single major crash. In fact, this cohort of scholar transport drivers are performing far above the level of the average South African driver.
Naidoo said that while we all think we’re good drivers, it takes a lot to examine data about your driving and confront the areas in which you need to improve.
“I’m delighted that there’s a growing cohort of scholar drivers that find it important to be open to receiving feedback around their driving performance,” she said.