At the moment, the sheer flood of public holidays – Good Friday, Family Day (aka Easter Monday), Freedom Day, Worker’s Day – provides an excellent opportunity to get a lot of time off work using very little leave days. Consequently, everyone is on holiday, the cities are empty and the roads busier than ever. A friend of mine told me today that she spent twelve hours driving to a festival only 630km away. Let’s hope the headlining act – the Hairy Legged Lentil Eaters – were worth it...
Surprisingly, my friend wasn’t even that annoyed about this odyssey to see veggie rock. It seems that living in South Africa quickly changes your perception – not only about distance, but also about congestion.
A couple of weeks ago I was staying with a friend in Joburg and was driving to Pretoria in the morning to go to work. My trip was fairly pleasant - traffic was flowing and I was making good progress travelling at 100km/h. The people on the other side of the highway, going from Pretoria to Joburg, weren’t quite so lucky - traffic wasn’t moving much, if at all.
Half way to Pretoria, the traffic news came on the radio and the first thing the reporter said was
“Traffic’s not too bad today.”At that point, I had driven past 23km of mainly standing and at best slow-moving (we’re talking 10km/h) traffic. Drivers were queuing to get on the highway, stood on the highway and queued to drive off it! Some queues went straight from an onramp to the offramp!
So after seeing 23km of no movement, I couldn’t believe my ears when the lady described traffic as not too bad! In Germany, traffic jams longer than a couple of kilometres are considered quite dreadful and those more than five a disaster. And here 23km qualifies as good traffic!
Things didn’t really improve much on the second half of my trip. Only as I got closer to Pretoria, traffic started to flow a bit better. But I knew as well as the people heading to Joburg that they were driving into 40km of traffic jams... what a lovely way to start the day!
I just hope those poor souls agreed with the lady on the radio and thought that this was really quite a good day for traffic...
PS: I will try my best to make this the last post about traffic for a while..
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