Motorised mayhem
Having been nearly wiped off the face of the planet twice on consecutive days at the R24 / N12 split in Bedfordview I thought it might be fruitful to share my observations on South African driving, and the rules of the road. For a start,“ rules of the road” is a bit strong in the South African context, for a“ rule” implies something cast in stone, something black-and-white, immutable. And that ' s not what a rule of the road is in South Africa. No: here, rules of the road are more like“ guidelines”; something one follows if one wishes, or not if one wants to live dangerously. So, here ' s some advice when entering the R24 to the airport off the N12: NEVER travel in the right( fast) hand lane. Rather, slow down and hug the left hand curb like a Cape Town drunk will hang on to a street sign in a Southeaster. That ' s because it ' s not unusual, I have discovered, for some directionless dickhead on one ' s left to decide, as he enters the R24, that he actually wants to be on the N12, and he simply scoots to the right across the intervening two lanes of traffic to achieve his new objective. And, while I ' m on the subject of left and right lanes, slow and fast, on highways I find it deeply endearing that we have put behind us all the accumulated wisdom of first-world highway codes of“ keep left, pass right”, an otherwise admirable and well-researched method of curbing road deaths, and we simply sail down the road in whatever lane we choose, at whatever speed we are comfortable with. Thus, on any highway in the country, but particularly the multi-lane ones around Gauteng, the left hand( slow) lane is often devoid of traffic except for a couple of BMWs and Porches travelling way beyond the speed limit( and they ' re not( always) blue-light drivers, either), while in the lanes further to the right sit trucks and bakkies, tannies and oomies, goggos and madodas tootling along at a steady 80km an hour. Let me tell you that if you drove like that in the UK( for example) you would be pulled over by a highway patrol, have points deducted from your licence and face a heavy fine faster than you could say“ Stirling Moss”. You would need to be in a permanent coma not to know by now that the two biggest kill-factors on our roads are drink, and speed. Alcohol is involved in about half of all road deaths in South Africa. That ' s a staggering( pun fully intended) number. But speeding is involved in a significant number, too, and on any trip on a Gauteng freeway( and not only on a freeway) you
THE BACK PAGE
will be passed by idiots doing well over the legal speed limit … to the left or to the right, and often weaving from left to right as they spot miniscule gaps between the streams of cars. It ' s the sort of driving you ' d expect from Jeremy Clarkson et al as they horse around in front of the cameras like overgrown schoolboys. And apart from the occasional high-profile arrest not much seems to be done about speeding ~ even though in Gauteng we have the perfect facility to end speeding once and for all on our highways. Instead of continuing with its farcical e-toll project which is frankly leading to its becoming discredited in the eyes of the travelling public, Sanral could do us all a favour( and earn a pretty penny in the process) if it coupled its number-plate recognition cameras in its e- toll gantries to synchronised clocks, which would print out a ticket if they picked up that a particular vehicle had driven from Gantry A to Gantry B in less time that it should take at the legal speed limit. But not all of us maplotters drive on highways. Many of us never venture much further than the local shop as we putter about our often potholed backstreets in our dust-caked cars and bakkies. And here lurks another danger: The four-way-stop or, as I like to call it, the dice-with-death. It ' s true that stop signs are sometimes stolen, knocked over or otherwise destroyed, but the number of people who ignore four-way stops and simply sail on through in the plot areas defies belief. On one road in our suburb, a quiet, narrow, potholed stretch of tar about a kilometre long, I can think of TWO fatal accidents within the past two years as a result of people omitting to stop at one or other of the four four-way stops, on that road alone. Think of the odds here: that ' s TWO cars, coming towards the same intersection at exactly the same time from different directions, and BOTH deciding to ignore a stop sign. Kaboom! Talk about motorised Russian roulette!
WRITTEN BY SMALLHOLDERS, FOR SMALLHOLDERS