Every festive season, SA’s road network absorbs the same predictable pressures: heavier volumes, volatile weather, fatigued drivers and a surge in avoidable incidents. Yet, despite decades of regulatory refinement, improved vehicle standards and increasingly sophisticated compliance systems, fatal crash numbers show only marginal year-on-year movement, reinforcing that the festive season continues to be one of the most dangerous periods on SA’s roads.
Safety specialists are aligned on the root cause: rules do not keep people safe – behaviour does.
It is the environment in which decisions are made, not the presence of a rulebook, that determines whether a driver has the psychological capacity to anticipate risk, respond appropriately and return home safely. Tracy van Helsdingen, Unitrans’ Head of SHERQ , explains this shift clearly: “Compliance guides you, but behaviour saves lives. A driver who knows the rule is not the same as a driver who lives the rule.”
This distinction is prompting a sector-wide rethink of what safety performance requires. Mature operators increasingly recognise that their most significant vulnerabilities are not mechanical, but human: fatigue that compromises judgement, frustration that compresses reaction times, emotional strain that erodes patience, and the micro-behaviours that accumulate into risk long before an incident occurs.
Modern defensive-driving programmes therefore place far greater emphasis on situational awareness, anticipation and emotional regulation. Abdullah Moerat, Unitrans’ People Development Manager and manager of the UniDrive programme, understands this deeply. The son of a truck driver, he grew up seeing the consequences of split-second decisions on families and communities. His lifelong commitment to shaping safer driving behaviour stems from that early awareness.
“Judgement isn’t produced in a classroom,” he notes. “It’s built through repetition, coaching and exposure to real conditions where a driver learns to recognise a risk before it presents itself.”
Since 2018, more than 4,500 Unitrans drivers have participated in the company’s theory, practical and in-cab training programmes, accounting for over 30,000 individual training and coaching interventions from bi-annual and annual refreshers. Yet scale alone is not the achievement. The real shift is in how training insights are applied: telematics is used as an early-warning system rather than a disciplinary tool; behaviour patterns are interpreted as emotional signals; and coaching conversations reinforce habit formation rather than merely correcting errors.
It is inside the cab that these principles come to life. Classroom theory may teach the rule; real-world road pressure tests whether it holds. In-cab training effectiveness reveals how a driver responds when congestion triggers impatience or when other road users behave unpredictably. These are the moments when defensive driving shifts from technical knowledge to emotional resilience. “In the cab, you see who a driver is when the road tests them,” Moerat says. “Coaching isn’t about correcting rules; it’s about correcting behaviour.”
The festive season intensifies these pressures significantly. Traffic density increases, pedestrian movement becomes less predictable, impaired road users rise, and weather patterns grow more erratic. Technical skill alone cannot compensate for these combined stressors. What matters most is behavioural readiness; the ability to stay composed, maintain spacing, anticipate hazards and regulate one’s responses under strain. Van Helsdingen emphasises this point: “We prepare drivers for how they feel, not just how they drive. When pressure rises, emotional regulation becomes a safety tool.”
Across high-risk global industries, the evidence is consistent: the organisations that achieve sustained safety performance are those that embed culture, not control. Culture is what turns rules into habits and habits into instinct. It is what enables a driver to slow down without prompting, maintain distance even when running behind schedule and speak up when something feels unsafe.
“A safety culture can’t live in documents,” van Helsdingen adds. “It has to live in people, and people adopt culture when they see it lived consistently around them.”
This cultural lens extends across the entire operational ecosystem. Controllers, dispatchers, supervisors and technicians all influence how safely a driver behaves on the road. A rushed instruction or unclear communication can erode composure just as quickly as an unexpected traffic delay. Sustainable safety performance therefore depends on aligned messaging, simplified expectations and focused behavioural reinforcement, not overwhelming teams with conflicting priorities.
The sector’s responsibility also extends beyond fleet operations. At Unitrans, these commitments are already embedded in day-to-day practice. Training teams regularly support community safety initiatives: running blind-spot awareness at truck stops, delivering Dangerous Goods instruction for law-enforcement recruits, providing defensive-driving training for humanitarian logistics teams and facilitating school-based engagements on pedestrian safety. These outreach programmes form part of Unitrans’ broader safety ecosystem, reinforcing the belief that safer roads depend on shared behaviour across all road users, not only professional drivers.
What emerges is a clear direction for the industry. While regulation, policy and procedural controls remain essential foundations for road safety, experience across high-risk sectors shows that they are rarely sufficient on their own to deliver sustained behavioural change. These tools have value, but the next leap in performance lies in behavioural reinforcement, credible coaching environments, emotionally intelligent leadership and cultures built on care rather than compliance. This is why Unitrans invests heavily in behavioural safety coaching, continuous in-cab assessments, and leadership practices that prioritise psychological readiness over procedural box-ticking. It is the quiet consistency, the daily “power of doing,” as Moerat describes it, that ultimately shapes safer roads.
“Our job is to help drivers get home safely,” Moerat says. “Systems and technology set the standard, but it’s daily decision-making and behaviour that brings safety to life on the road.”
As South Africa enters another high-risk festive season, one principle stands firm: rules shape expectations, training shapes capability, but behaviour shapes outcomes on every road, in every cab, every day. For Unitrans, this is not theory – it is the operational reality behind thousands of daily journeys across the region.
