Overloading cars is suicide

Phumla Matjila: It was the incessant "ding" on the dashboard, alerting me to an unclosed boot, that forced me to pull off the road outside the gate of a house.

The chatter on the dash made it difficult for me to follow the meandering strip of road as I made my way back home from Soweto on a wet, grey Thursday afternoon.

So I stopped at the gate of a quaint house with a chain-link fence and gate. Behind the gate, under a dimly lit canopy of old vines, a family were loading stuff into an old Mercedes-Benz station wagon for their Easter weekend travels.

The Germans would have been offended to see their Benz - the vehicle of choice of Herr Doktors and Herr Direktors - being loaded like a donkey. That it is an old Benz is no excuse to treat a piece of fine German engineering like that.

So there, on a gloomy-weathered day, I watched a family beaming with excitement, about to endanger themselves and the lives of other motorists with each kilogram of load they added to their car.

And they did pile on the kilos, until I could not take it anymore.

On the roof of the car, a roll of the chain-link fence that marks this family's yard was held in place with rope. The rope was woven around a couple of rolled sponges, a stack of pillows, two or three plastic drums, a bicycle - and a wheelbarrow.

The boot was filled with boxes, bags and plastic bags so that it looked like it would burst open with just a tap. It is a balancing act to load a car like that, and it is even trickier to drive it.

I was scared for this family. And I'm sure that, even though they were overloading their car to the point of suicide, their main fear once they were on the open road - in the dead of night or at the break of dawn on the way to Limpopo, Mpumalanga, KwaZulu-Natal, or even beyond our borders - was that they might be stopped by traffic cops.

I find it insane that the fear of such people is not of dying but of cops.

It is a pity that no one sees them soon enough to stop them from killing themselves.

And people do die on our roads every day, even more so at this time of the year.

As of 10am yesterday, 127 people had died on our roads since the start of the Easter weekend. By the time you read this, the toll will have risen as people make their way back from their holiday destinations.

According to Arrive Alive, most of the accidents on our roads are caused by tyre failure and dangerous overtaking.

Interestingly, overloading plays a big role in these two leading causes of carnage on our roads. According to Arrive Alive, overloaded vehicles can cause tyres to overheat and wear rapidly, increasing the chance of failure or blow-out.

An overloaded vehicle also cannot accelerate normally, which makes overtaking difficult. This is in addition to the car being less stable, difficult to steer, taking longer to stop and a host of other dangers associated with overloading.

There are already enough dangers on our roads to deal with - drunks, unroadworthy vehicles, motorists who disrespect the rules of the road, fatigued drivers, and taxi and bus operators who put money before the safety of passengers. Overloading is suicide.

It doesn't matter whether the vehicle is overloaded with baggage or passengers, the dangers are the same.

I hope that family in the old Merc will be among the lucky ones who make it home safe and sound.

But some families will not be so lucky.