Musings by Generator

It is my turn to rant and rave about something that is really affecting the sanity of all Johannesburg residents at the moment, the road works!

I live in Fourways, where the road works affect people badly due to William Nicole being one of two ways out of Fourways, and it is just a mess at the moment.

My favourite piece of planning is the robots at affected junctions, they have dug them out to allow them to create new lanes, shoulders, islands, what ever, and just left the electrical cables exposed to the elements, during the time of year where anyone who has lived here for a month will know that it is our rainy season, and it has been pouring.

As any South African will attest to, our cabling, telecommunications and electrical, is not the best in the world and sometimes even a dirty look from someone will send a cable into a nervous breakdown and a suburb will spend a month with out some or other service while the useless people responsible dig random holes and sit under the trees all day. So you can only imagine what happens to an electrical cable when water touches it in this country.

Now, I can here you, dear international reader, muttering away, “of course I know, it’s the same in any country”. Not exactly, in other countries, the cable will cause a localised short and it will be reported and promptly fixed, you would probably be without the service for 2 or 3 days at most.

Here, it is an entirely different story, when rain water gets to an electrical cable, which it always will, leaving them exposed just means it takes 1 second not 4 days, the cable has a complete spazz attack, and not only will the effect be local but it will knock out all surrounding areas. This happens every time it rains here in Johannesburg. Sure, it gets reported but it normally it takes the relevant authorities a couple of weeks to get it right.

So on to this morning, I only have to be at work by 10 am, so I generally leave home at 8:30 which means I will be at work by 9 each day, but not today. Today, it took me an hour and a half to do the 2 or so odd kilometres out of Fourways, and then I had to deal with the bad congestion of everyone else who had just gotten out of Fourways in the other suburbs/areas I have to drive through to get to work. This means I only got to work after 10:30 this morning.

The cause of this? the aforementioned dug up robots at the William Nicole on and off ramps to the freeway that have shorted themselves, and a pair of robots on either side of the freeway, causing chaos of gargantuan proportions.

Now, Fourways maybe a relatively small suburb, the big problem is this, Fourways has two gyms, a high school and numerous nursery schools and day care centres. So a lot of people come through Fourways, from the surrounding areas, on their way to work to drop kids off at school, go to gym, or both. So the number of road users in Fourways is high number during rush hours.

I know the local government is busy upgrading roads so that this type of traffic is thing of the past and that it is easy for residents and tourists alike to get around during this years world cup, but for the love of god, can’t you make a plan so the robots just work, even when they have been dug up and put in empty oil drums so they vaguely point in the right direction. People in Johannesburg are going insane already with just the delays thanks to the road works (lane closures, road closures, detours etc), don’t push them over the edge and into full blown battle mode by making it harder for them to earn a living by having major intersections down during rush hour.

Driving to work this morning, through the red haze of hatred for the road works that had come over me, I noticed the same crazed look on my fellow commuters faces. I am pretty sure someone is going to go ballistic soon and ram something somewhere, where it shouldn’t be!

Really is a hard life down here in cape town: