Planning in tandem with overall Mobility Strategy us lacking

There is an incredible amount of detail in the Draft Road Safety policy document, and this comment will not seek to address the specifics, but rather to comment on the overall lack of 'context' and integration into the overall mobility strategy.

The overall mobility strategy talks to the critical need for Cape Town to shift mobility away from reliance on private cars to one where (1) we reduce the need to move around by car (2) we deliberately encourage and prioritise public transport with closely integrated active mobility.

Whilst many of the interventions are very welcome, it is still fundamentally set in a reactive (crash-driven), car-centred paradigm, instead of looking at Road Safety from the perspective of preventative safety for pedestrians, utility cyclists and other more vulnerable road users - particularly in the residential/urban realm: road safety being one the primary reasons why people do not commute by bicycle in the first place.

The Road Safety strategy makes no mention of the failure to implement previous strategies, nor does it look at the success or not of the overall mobility strategy from the lens of road safety: ie how has failure to implement previous road safety strategies failed to contribute to the modal shifts we desire.

The intervention that is a "no-brainer" and has shown to be one the most basic interventions for road safety is that of car speed. It is completely unacceptable that the norm for residential and urban driving is still 60kph. There is abundance evidence how speed, along with the ever-increasing size of cars, make roads exponentially less safe for road users who are not in cars. Driving Speed should be right at the top of short-term interventions for any Road Safety Strategy to be viewed as serious (many of the short-term interventions fall into an umbrella of 'speed limits' - so as a basic, immediate point of action speed should be a primary focus).

Fitting into my comment about the integration with overall mobility policy, the establishment of NMT (active mobility) Corridors is of critical importance, and should not be relegated to 'medium-term programmes'. The impact of the trains crisis and increased car traffic, along with the safety issues which has made the City-Blouberg NMT corridor effectively unusable, means that cycle commuting has declined in many areas - particularly into town and to stations (as a result of train unreliability). These are critical road safety issues that need to be addressed immediately.

Interestingly, in areas where cycling is safer and safer lanes have been provided on logical corridors (eg Spaanschemat in Tokai/Constantia), more utility cyclists are seen.

PS: The question below "Do you support this Draft Strategy?" is too binary! I do support many aspects, but not the framing. There should be an option for a more nuanced appraisal.