Breaking laws 'spectacularly'
2007-10-18 14:50
Georgina Guedes
A couple of evenings ago, as I was leaving my suburb, I encountered yet another incident of appalling taxi-driver behaviour.
It was the tail-end of rush hour and there was a seven-car queue at the stop street leading out of my section of Orange Grove. Since I was turning right across two lanes of heavy traffic, I moved as far to the right of the stop street as I could, to allow cars turning left to sneak past me.
As I was about to seize a gap, four taxis drove past me, coming the wrong way up the road on the right of me, turned left in front of me and cut me off.
I sat in stupefaction for a few moments before re-gathering myself and resuming vigilance for the next gap, my two-way head-waggling to watch cars approaching from the left and right now having found a third compass point, watching for the peril coming from behind.
A few moments after the taxis had disappeared, a traffic policeman drove into my suburb. I wished to myself that he had been there a few moments earlier, but also wondered if he would have done anything about the taxis.
Losing Hope
When I finally got to my friend Susan's house, I told her my story. She works near to where I live, so she passes through the same area every day. The moment the words "taxi drivers" passed my lips, her eyes widened in fury.
"Do you know what else they're doing now?" she asked indignantly. "They're driving, two abreast, the wrong way down Hope Street! And if they're in your way and you hoot at them, they just fold their arms and glare at you."
Hope Street is a one-way suburban road that runs parallel to Louis Botha Avenue, and so, like my area, often gets taxi-spillover during rush hour.
I happily accept that taxis have a right to travel down suburban roads in times of congestion. It is for this very reason that when our suburb applied for booms and gates that we were told that they had to be open from seven in the morning until seven at night, so as not to restrict the flow of traffic.
What is not acceptable is that once taxis have departed from the main stream of traffic, that they break the laws so spectacularly.
Front-page news
The story of the taxi drivers was on the front page of the North Eastern Tribune, our local paper, this week. Residents, up-in-arms, had been taking photos of the taxis and begging the police to come and patrol the street during rush hour.
Nothing had been done by the time the article went to print, but Susan reported to me that the morning after our discussion, the Metro Police were stationed on Hope Road and so, of course, there were no taxis.
But this is only one morning's prevention. I don't know if it is now going to be regular police policy to post a patrol car at both ends of the street, but this doesn't solve the bigger problem of the increasing lawlessness of taxi drivers on our roads today.
If the police are on this corner, the taxi drivers will be committing the same atrocities elsewhere. When I used to work in Sandton, I had to keep a running mantra in my head, "don't lose your cool, girl," to contain my rage at the number of traffic offenses left unchecked by the police.
Merely flashing their sirens at taxis driving in the emergency lane so that they move into the main flow of traffic on the highway is not sufficient policing.
But more strident measures - fining or the threat of license confiscation - don't seem to act as much of a deterrent for the drivers who transport the majority of our workforce to and from work every day. I suspect they don't pay their fines and just buy new licenses.
A new solution
So here's what I propose. Since taxi drivers are providing a public service, they should all be licensed, not as drivers, but as taxi drivers. Any taxi driver caught driving without the appropriate license will have his taxi impounded instantly. Any taxi driver caught breaking the law in any way will have his taxi impounded immediately.
The taxi will only be released after a hearing and the payment of a fine that fits the crime. This targets the taxi driver where it hurts the most - his only asset, his taxi.
Since these people are responsible for the lives of so many others, they should be held to a higher standard. The fines should be higher, the penalties should be greater and the policing should be more stringent.
Instead, we suffer under a look-the-other-way policy on the part of our traffic police, because taking on the taxis is a task too huge and frightening. I see in this morning's paper that a taxi driver dragged a metro policewoman twenty metres down a street for confronting him. Now that's the kind of person we want responsible for the lives of others in our country today.
Perhaps, in the same way as we now have private security companies to do the jobs the police can't, we should also have private, armed traffic wardens, appointed by contributing members on each street, to do what the police won't and the government does not provide for. But this is exactly the kind of escalation of violence that this country doesn't need.
Georgina Guedes is a freelance journalist. She also sees in the newspaper that Manto Tshabalala-Msimang delivered cribs to Baragwanath Hospital, but isn't sure that this photo-opportunity is addressing the real problem.
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