Traffic giving me the pip

Friday traffic is a thing of the past for me. It will have to be a life-threatening emergency to get me on a road anywhere over Ou Kaapse Weg after 12 on a Friday, otherwise the chances of getting home again without an hour or more in traffic jams is a certainty.  The incessant development of the South Peninsula is, as always, at the expense of those who already live there, by way of diminished lifestyle, stressful journeys for basic needs such as work and school with the added annoyance of the taxis who flout every rule of the road as they muscle their way through the queues, and about three hours wasted which should be spent with the family. Yet nothing appears to stand in the way of the desire of the developers to cover every available open space with tar and concrete in the hope of making a huge amount of money.

There should be no need for residents to desperately seek funds to pay lawyers to protest against these developments - the very people who have been placed in positions where they are supposed to look after the interests of ratepayers and preserve the land for future generations - indeed, public servants - act in direct opposition to the will of the people. A simple No should be all that is required. It is a sad fact that money talks, but it speaks the wrong language - it brings out the worst in people. And it is little wonder that bouts of extreme road rage erupt when people are forced to sit in traffic because the authorities seem unable or incapable of solving the problems through basic common sense.

A step in the right direction would be to make every person who works in the traffic department travel through the Sun Valley/Capri robots on a Friday afternoon.  By the third week, they will have ripped out the robots and got the bulldozers out making roundabouts and a dual carriageway. Or at the very least, put a traffic cop on duty to override the lights - that should work like a charm. The fact that so many of our drivers have no right to even be on the road is, of course, a whole other story.