Staff Reporter
KwaZulu-Natal will, for the first time, target drunk pedestrians during its 2026 Easter holiday and Passover road safety campaign.
“Critically, for the first time, through 28 pedestrian enforcement operations, we will clamp down against drunk pedestrians who will be walking on busy roads,” Transport and Human Settlements MEC Siboniso Duma said on Tuesday.
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“We will also penalise pedestrians who fail to use pedestrian bridges on various routes.”
The campaign was launched on Tuesday with inspections of public transport vehicles at the Umdloti RTI Centre, where authorities had checked 17 buses and minibus taxis by 9am and impounded four vehicles.
Duma said “the no-nonsense teams from Operation Shanela and Road Traffic Inspectorate impounded four vehicles during the inspection”, while “a multi-disciplinary roadblock executed in KwaMashu, jointly with SAPS, eThekwini Metro Police and other key stakeholders has set the tone for the weeks ahead”.
He said the province had set itself a target of reducing road deaths by 10% over the Easter and Passover period.
Referring to last year’s campaign, Duma said: “During Easter 2025, we recorded a 38% decrease in the number of fatalities compared to the 43% we recorded in 2024.”
He said more than 3,483 law enforcement officers and 105 national police officers had been deployed and would operate around the clock until 3 May.
The operation will include 148 multidisciplinary roadblocks, more than 80 roadblocks focused on drunk driving, more than 118 speed operations in high-accident zones and areas frequented by visitors and worshippers.
More than 17 interprovincial roadblocks are to be undertaken by a roving team of law enforcement officers.
Duma said authorities would also carry out more than 91 operations focused on scholar transport during the school holidays.
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He said unroadworthy vehicles and taxis would be removed from the roads and that authorities would target owners as well as drivers.
Duma also said the department was stepping up activity at its weighbridges.
He said the busiest site was Midway weighbridge, where “the most vehicles weighed at a single weighbridge were 40 441 vehicles at the Midway weighbridge, with an average of 3 370 vehicles weighed per month”.
Duma said overloaded trucks and vehicles with fraudulent papers had already been impounded.
“We have already impounded trucks that were overloaded and those that we intercepted moving up and down with fake registration documents,” he said.
He said the department also wanted to introduce artificial intelligence “in order to automate the weighing process, improve accuracy, and prevent fraud through features like automated number plate recognition, real-time data analytics, and anomaly detection”.