The provincial government of Limpopo assumed control of a digital dashboard designed to track vehicle crashes, pedestrian accidents and transport patterns. Developed by the CSIR, an organization providing urban planning and geospatial expertise, the software enables the Limpopo Department of Transport to implement weekly operational adjustments.
The province requested a proof of concept for the tool in 2023 to identify high-risk areas and allocate law enforcement resources during peak traffic periods. Government officials received the completed platform in September after testing it during development over the Easter Weekend in April 2026.
Traffic volumes surge across the province during the annual Easter pilgrimage, a tradition dating back to the 1940s that draws millions of Zionist Christian Church members to Zion City Moria, located 25 kilometers outside of Polokwane. During the 2026 Easter Weekend, the Road Traffic Management Corporation, a national traffic authority, reported that Limpopo accounted for 17.62% of total road fatalities in South Africa. The province recorded 37 traffic-related deaths and 29 fatal crashes over the period, representing a 141.67% increase from 12 crashes in 2025. Across the country, pedestrians accounted for 48.57% of all road fatalities that weekend, resulting in 102 deaths.
The dashboard maps data points to identify specific incident locations and emergency response times. “Officials can now use the dashboard to filter road incidents by vehicle type, location (routes) or heavy traffic seasons, such as Easter or the Christmas holidays,” said Johan Maritz, urban planning and geospatial expert at the CSIR. “They can also see how accessible incidents were to emergency responders in terms of travel time from a response station.” The development team incorporated additional layers into the system, including the coordinates of emergency response stations, to assist the government with risk management. “It would assist them in targeting their efforts and limited resources more effectively to deal with the high rate of road incidents,” Maritz said.
Since implementing the software, provincial inspectors monitor the system each week to adjust field operations. The data revealed correlations between traffic incidents and cross-border vehicles traveling through Limpopo, which shares boundaries with Mozambique, Botswana and Zimbabwe. “We have also seen trends that led us to establish a permanent 24-hour N1 brigade to patrol the highway,” said Prudence Mashige, provincial inspector within the Limpopo Department of Transport. “We now know that the peak time for road incidents starts at about 2 pm on a Thursday and continues throughout the weekend.” The department uses the platform to reduce officer deployments in zones with low incident rates.
The geospatial mapping also highlighted localized risks involving foot traffic. “One of the most shocking patterns the maps have revealed so far is the number of pedestrians who are killed in areas around liquor outlets,” Mashige said. “We have seen, for instance, many instances of pedestrians entering a public road in an unsafe area while intoxicated.” To enhance future data collection, the CSIR team expects to build integrations for real-time field reporting. “A road incident mobile application for officials to capture information that directly feeds into the dashboard would be ideal and would improve accuracy,” Maritz said.
