Buckle up - maniacs up ahead
AND SO it begins; the yearly headlong flight to the coast, to the hinterland; anywhere except Joburg. I wonder why?
Joburg is stunning at this time of the year, particularly when everyone buggers off.
You can manage to drive from A to B without gridlock or road rage and the weather is stunning, with some highveld thundershowers thrown in for good measure, and everyone’s in a great mood.
The gridlock and the road rage shift to our national highways and byways as wave after wave of desperate lemmings head for Durban, the Eastern Cape, Limpopo or Zim. Not Cape Town, though, cause you can get the flights so cheap.
Some have to do it because it’s the only chance they’re going to get the entire year to see their families.
I have immense empathy for those forced to endure cramped buses in marathon safaris on oftenindifferent roads past voracious customs officials.
I sympathise with families trying their damnedest to get the kids to the coast without throttling the little horrors, while hauling caravans behind them up hill and down dale.
What I can’t countenance, though, is the absolute selfishness of drivers who simply don’t care about anyone or anything but themselves.
We moan about taxi drivers in Joburg – and rightfully so – but our taxi drivers look like paragons of virtue compared with some of the drivers I came across during a sojourn in the Eastern Cape.
It’s amazing that there are cars in East London without dings in them because stop signs, traffic lights and car indicators are totally abstract concepts.
When I moaned, the incredulous locals looked at me and muttered: “But you should see what Mthatha is like, or Butterworth.” The mind boggles, truly. The real horror, however, is the open road: drivers determined to get in front, irrespective of whether they are breaching a double barrier line on a hairpin bend or on a blind rise.
Drivers in skorokoros that would be banned in Bulawayo or expensive Beemers that belong in Sandton City. Oncoming drivers pelting down the road – in your lane, towards you – in the full expectation that you will brake to let them pass in front of your nose or pull off the road altogether to miss them.
Or, my new absolute phobia, trucks determined to use those special overtaking lanes that come up every 5km or so to try to overtake other trucks at a top speed of about 80km/h, while faster cars queue behind them in the vain hope of getting past them too before the overtaking lane ends.
In one unforgettable incident, four cars ran out of space and had to fall back while a taxi was forced into oncoming traffic as the trucks closed up and resolutely prevented it from nipping back into the correct lane. But just as I was becoming dis- consolate (the stakes were still low, this was a couple of days before the president bulleted finance minister Nhlanhla Nene and sent the rand into a tailspin) and wondering where the cops were, my prayers were answered by the mother of all roadblocks just south of the Vaal River.
Free
State
traffic
officers, together with the SAPS, on the northbound and the southbound lanes, were checking licences, registration numbers, the roadworthiness of vehicles, and for outstanding fines.
All of a sudden it was the equivalent of driving with choir boys. And there endeth the sermon. We can run all manner of aware- ness campaigns, although Transport Minister Dipuo Peters has apparently canned one this year, but they won’t stop the selfish arseholes who drive as if the road is theirs by right; the only thing that will end the scourge is pain and suffering – theirs.
Arseholishness cuts through creed, class and colour, so here’s my tip for Minister Peters: impound all the cars that have expired licences or are unroadworthy.
Fine the drivers whose licences were bought or which have expired, jail those found speeding – in fact, do what they’ve done in KwaZuluNatal, use Sanral’s gantries as big brother: if you go through two of them more quickly than you ought to, then you are handed a speeding fine, no quarter given.
When you survive a road trip through our beautiful country, it’s not just the stunning scenery that you’ve been privileged to experience – it’s the incredulity that not more people are killed on the roads every year.
When Peters does decide to reimagine the road safety campaign, she must change the messaging.
Stop telling everyone to drive safely.
Rather tell them: “Drive as if the car in front of you or coming towards you is being driven by a homicidal maniac.”
That way a lot more of us will safely get to where we are going and back home this year.