By the time you read this it will be Resurrection Day if you're a Christian. Happy Easter to you. If you're not a Christian, please enjoy the rest of your weekend snorkeling in Plettenberg Bay, braaing in Rustenburg or gyrating to deep house music in Umlazi. Oh, and if it can be helped, please don't perish in a pool of your own blood on our infamous roads.
This is unless your chosen career path is being a flight attendant, in which case you'll be asking the heathens returning from snorkeling in Plettenberg Bay whether they want chicken or beef.
I struggle with wrapping my tiny brain around the extra road-safety awareness campaigns on steroids this time of year. Look, I totally appreciate there are significantly higher volumes of vehicles embarking on long-distance trips on our national roads.Because we're South African, one of our favourite pastimes besides binge drinking and bickering along melanin lines is colliding with each other with our cars. So I get it. But the number of fatalities during this period last year was 235. And that's 235 too many.
Over the past three years the average for this period has hovered around 225 deaths. Here's where my maths lets me down. The average number of fatalities on our roads per month are about 1,150. That's the average for all months. Including the month(s) that the Easter weekend falls on. Let that one swirl around a bit while we take a detour.
One number concerns me most about our road fatalities. And that is the number of pedestrians and cyclists who die. It is about 40% of the total. That's two out of five. My disquiet about this is that I have yet to read about a pedestrian coming out of the Adderley KFC colliding with another pedestrian coming out of the Cape Town Station KFC at the corner of Strand and Adderley, leaving a mangle of soft twirls and Krushers.
Each time a pedestrian dies, the common factor 100% of the time is a driver of a car. I'm a reluctant driver of a car. This is because I would not own a car if our public transport was even remotely reliable and adequate.As a member of this club of peasants who operate vehicles, my posse is responsible for the death of 5,410 folks on foot in the year 2016 alone. That is a significantly higher number of people than those watching Platinum Stars and Ajax Cape Town strikers kick a football everywhere except in the net every weekend.
These are people who, for reasons outside or within their control, had ostensibly said: "I'm not participating in this whole combustible engine business." And people in my lager mow them down with machines daily. Now I'll be first to point out that there's no pedestrian equivalent of the Automobile Association. But perhaps there should be a Two Limbs and Two Wheels Association to push back against my squad in this road turf war.
There's bound to be at least one reader who will hallucinate that I'm saying motorists deliberately aim at pedestrians or even that when these collisions between machine and flesh occur, motorists are always in the wrong.
Hardly. A huge chunk of these are due to jaywalking. Drive in any busy street corner and pedestrians are milling around, crossing streets wherever the hell they please, with seemingly scant regard for their lives.A friend and I were getting lost around the Wanderers Street Long Distance Rank in the Joburg CBD the other day. The jaywalking was not as bad as around the streets of Lekki Market in Lagos where drivers have to hoot every 3.4 seconds to plead with the crowd on the road to part like the Red Sea in awe of Moses's staff.
Still, we had to snake through the pedestrians with no regard for road markings, assuming there were markings. A few times, my friend who is not too au fait with Jhb CBD driving, had to be reminded that the road in that area belongs to foot walkers first and not car by loud banging on his boot and bonnet.He was visibly traumatised. I just rolled down my window, slunk back in my seat to project an "I'm cool and I'm used to driving around here" look.
But being "cool" is a huge part of the psyche of pedestrians, I submit. Walking fearlessly between lanes on a busy road shows you're not a "moegoe" from the rural areas. But I have an almost paranoid fear of being hit by a car.
You would be too if you had seen two childhood friends taken out by cars on a busy main road. But my greatest fear about being hit by a car is not that I will die. I'm way too shallow and juvenile to worry about serious eventualities.
My worry is that the car will hit me and my head will land on a pile of turds deposited by a street kid on nyaope who is on a polony and atchar diet. And then I worry that I will try to move my nose away and the paramedics will pin me down, whispering: "Whatever you do, don't move. Your spine might be broken."
Can we just assume that everyone around us, especially those on foot or bicycles, do not know how they're supposed to behave? All year round. Don't be surprised if you save a life in the process...