Driving in South Africa

Driving a vehicle in South Africa...............

There seems to be more and more cars, taxis, busses and trucks on our roads, and the numbers are increasing! What is not improving is the quality of our roads, although there is a lot of work going on prior to the FIFA world cup in June this year. Due to the high traffic volumes aggravated by the plentiful rains this season, potholes seem to be popping up everywhere. Maybe the slight increase in 4X4 sales is the reason for this! Although the roadworks are necessary, it has impacted on the long queues of vehicles in traffic jams, many hours of wasted time on the  road, an increase in driver frustration levels which often leads to road rage, and most importantly, INCONSIDERATION of drivers towards other road users!

I drive mostly in the Pretoria East suburban areas, and every day I see incidents of road rage, total inconsideration of drivers toward their fellow drivers, breaking the law, and clearly ignoring robots and roadsigns just so that they can get to the front of the queue and reach their destination first!

I would like to know whether the driver's and learners licence syllabus has changed. In my day of getting a learner's and drivers licence, the robot lights were described as follows :

RED : STOP

AMBER : upon approaching an amber robot, slow down to a stop so that you are stationary by the time the robot is red.

GREEN : Go, pull away from the robot intersection.

Nowadays, some drivers interpret the robot colours as the following :

RED : Go like hell to make sure you don't get stuck in the intersection!

AMBER : Do not slow down, but speed up to see if you can quickly make it through the intersection before the robot turns red.

Green : Stop - because you have to now wait for the people who hopped the AMBER and RED robots who are stuck in the intersection.

Is it no wonder that people are becoming more aggressive and more incidents of road rage are occurring!

Interesting....................!!