The Hidden Fence

Today’s 12 o’clock news made me think, I should write once more about the traffic. Let me start with today’s bad news: two people were killed and another 15 injured when a minibus taxi collided with a car. 21 workers were injured when their truck overturned. These are just the two worst accidents, many more could be added to this list only for today around Joburg.

The at least 17 people involved in the minibus accident show how crowded these taxis are. Where in Europe you would place 9 persons including the drive in such a car (still less than 3.5t), you can easily fit 15 persons in it; the taxi might then have problems to drive uphill or brake within a reasonable distance, but you can drive it!

The second accident shows another means of transport: small open trucks, normally used for merchandise, can carry over 20 workers to their construction site. This works independent of temperature and weather conditions (e.g. rain and wind). Such a truck can still drive at over 100 km/h on the highway. One can understand why there are such terrible accidents.

Every morning in the traffic updates, you hear the list of “traffic lights out of order”. This can be because there is no power in the whole suburb or just because the robot (South African word for traffic light) is out of order. Those traffic lights are then treated as four way stops, which works quite well (of course only if you leave priority to the minibuses). The right of way is by order of arrival at the intersection which works incredibly well.

Traffic gets worse with the weather: last Wednesday it took me about one hour (instead of 15 minutes) to get home from work. It rained a lot and in addition to that, we had a power failure in quite a big part of Sandton (north of Johannesburg). The highway was totally blocked and so were all roads leading to it. Of course all the side roads were affected as well, thankfully I had like every day downloaded the latest podcast of the Swiss radio “Echo der Zeit” to which I listened while driving through this chaos.