James Siddall believes that when he does finally check out, it will probably be due to heart failure induced by the antics of one or more of the road-users here. Sadly, they represent just the tip of the iceberg…
1) Warlike taxi drivers – South Africa’s taxi drivers are an absurdly easy and obvious target, so before I go any further let me start with a few disclaimers.
First, they provide an essential service. Some figures say that up to 60 per cent of all South African commuters use taxis.
Second, not all taxi drivers are motorised Genghis Khans. Just the other day, as I was edging into traffic in my test Suzuki Grand Vitara, a smiling Quantum driver flashed his lights and waved me into the flow.
Third, in the distant past, when I’ve been through extremely, um, financially marginalised life-stages, I’ve regularly used what some term “black taxis” – a rather verboten term today – and found the drivers to vary from mild to wild, and aggressive to amiable.
But – and this is an unfortunately big “but” – the sheer anarchy with which so many taxi drivers disport themselves frequently has me clutching my chest. Road rules, the 100km/h limit theoretically governing taxis, and any vague acquaintance with the laws of physics are strangers indeed to what sadly seems to be the majority of taxi drivers.
Reports of taxi involvements in fatal crashes are so commonplace that I sometimes think that when Bruce Springsteen sang of “suicide machines” in Born To Run he wasn’t referring to some hemi-headed hunk of Michigan muscle, but to an overloaded Hiace running on retreads at 130 km/h in rush-hour traffic.
And then there’s the spectre of taxi violence…
Sometimes, just sometimes, it’s tempting to believe that one day a more muscular government, appalled at the taxi industry’s seeming utter inability to regulate itself, will pull it into line with legislation and regulation.
2) Tailgating Charlies – Jaguar’s Mk2 carried badging to the effect that it was equipped with disc brakes. This didn’t so much pre-empt the onset of absurdly ostentatious nomenclature, but served as a warning.
Cars in the ‘60s were generally equipped with drum brakes. The Jag’s badge told other road-users that it was likely to stop in a trice – although all things are obviously relative, and the Mk2’s brakes were distinctly arboreal by modern standards.
Indeed, when I drove a 1966 3.8 a while ago, I didn’t so much depress the brake pedal as stand on it, making you realise just how appalling the drum brakes on the rest of the cars must have been in those days.
Today, ABS is close to universal on new cars, though stopping times still vary hugely between vehicles, as a glance though CAR’s road test figures will attest and braking distances have greatly decreased.
But such is human nature that if you give people margins, they use them up, as Sir Alec Issognois is rumoured to have said of the original Mini and its agility.
So people tailgate. They forget – or never knew – about the theory of increased stopping distances. If you double your speed, your stopping distance quadruples. They ignore the fact that driving conditions, drivers’ reactions and road surfaces differ vastly. As do cars.
Even if all drivers’ reactions were equal, there would still be massive disparity between stopping distances: a chunk of SA’s vehicles are woefully under-braked, ill-maintained rolling wrecks.
So then please tell me that I’m not alone in being incandescent when I drive a modern car – the Mercedes-Benz C200 CGi BlueEfficiency I recently gave back comes to mind – with brilliant brakes. And then see a decaying Datsun 120Y, that looks like it last had preventative maintenance around the time Mandela was freed, stoically sitting metres away from my tail as I arrow down the freeway…
3) Envious, economically impotent individuals – an occupational hazard of being a motoring journalist, even one on the periphery of the industry, is that you have access to an occasionally dazzling array of machinery in-between the humble hatchbacks and prosaic pick-ups. And so you get to see a nasty side of human nature.
In well over a decade of disporting myself in a variety of prestigious cars, from Corvettes to Cadillacs, and Rolls-Royce motor cars (the correct, factory-approved plural apparently) to Range Rovers, I’ve come to a few conclusions.
One, expensive cars are wonderful, but they do offer diminishing value. A R4-million Maybach, for instance, is not thrice superior to a Mercedes S600L at a third of the price.
Two, when you’re aggressively tailgated or subjected to remarks of: “Think you’re big stuff, hey?” while behind the wheel of something blatantly bling, it’s not the car or the driver that the perpetrator loathes – it’s themselves and their economic inadequacy.
Very often they are, quite simply, rendered impotent with envy. When, to take an example from a long list, a bunch of beery barbarians in a decaying Datsun hurled spirited abuse at me as I piloted a top-range Teutonic luxo-barge, I was reminded of this.
An interesting but controversial corollary of these politics of envy is that, at least in KZN where I live, there’s a clear racial element at work. Those virtually immobilised with hatred at the sight of something costing more than a modest suburban home are often white. Conversely, those almost rapturous with joy at the sight of, shall we say a new Maserati prowling down the freeway, are often Indian or black, of all socio-economic groups.
And no, I don’t pretend to understand this cultural phenomenon either.
4) Death-wish pedestrians – This morning a woman walked in front of my car, although I saw her from a long way off. She looked neither left nor right, nor up or down, but simply strode into the road, with a sense of entitlement that telegraphed that she had more right to be there than a car.
She also appeared woefully ignorant of the argument that dictated that, in a meeting of bodies, her frame would come off somewhat worse than a vehicle 20 times her weight. There are millions of reckless pedestrians and that raises a question: if we need a license to drive on public roads, shouldn’t we have one to walk on them too?
5) Speed merchants – It was apparently Benjamin Disraeli who said there are “lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Scottish poet and novelist Andrew Lang put it even better, saying, “he uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts – for support rather than illumination.”
So I’m not going to get into one of the tiresome speed debates, where one corner dredges up figures to show that any speed over 89,74 km/h is potentially fatal, while the other fires back with figures showing that 57, 63 per cent of all autobahn drivers who own Bugatti Veyrons report mild somnolence when travelling at less than 301,53 km/h.
The fact is that on South Africa’s ever-crowded, ever-decaying roads, populated by a vastly disparate range and age of vehicles, and where driver skill varies alarmingly, posted speed limits serve a useful purpose.
Which is why, when I witness someone flashing along at gross excess of the limit, I feel they might as well have a sign emblazoned on their vehicle reading: “My time is so infinitely more valuable than yours that getting somewhere fast is perfectly worth risking other, more marginal lives. Like yours.”