Ask any Cape-Townian what the single worst daily traffic jam in Cape Town is, we all know the answer. The M5 crossing over the N1 going North or turning to Paarl. What we tend not to think about is why this is so. The road itself is fine. What causes the massive daily delays is a few selfish morons who think their time is worth more than everybody else’s – so they get in the Left-hand lane, which is meant for the (very few at the end of the day) cars going to the CBD drive to the end of that lane then press back into the crowded right hand lane.
Now the sheer volume of cars in that lane means that it will always be a bit slow, we can reasonably expect a ten minute delay there – but these people are so self-important that, in order to save that ten minutes – they act with utter and complete disrespect towards everyone else on the road – and the resulting delays generally means that everybody who is too decent to act this way now ends up queuing for half an hour or more (sometimes over an hour).
Of course, because the people in that right hand lane are the decent ones – they always let the assholes back into the lane upfront (the right thing to do would be to simply deny them a gap and leave them waiting longer than everybody else) – so these guys get a nice feeling of accomplishment at having not been one of the suckers in the queue. Well frankly, if that’s your attitude to people… if you do something like that without having a women on the backseat in labor (rather unlikely as the nearest hospital is the other way) then that makes you, the worst kind of human being.
The kind that makes this world terrible for everybody. Obsessed only with your own needs and desires, convinced of your own self-importance, seeing all other people merely as obstacles or, at best, stepping stones.
I believe that when somebody can be that extremely selfish (it’s probably borderline psychopathy) in one aspect of their lives the odds of them being any better in any other aspect of their lives is so vanishingly small as to be, effectively, non-existent.
Yes the line between those lanes should be made solid and lane changes prohibited for 1km prior to the offramp (though this present a problem for the one or two people who are new to the city and may not realize they are in the wrong lane until the last moment) – that may improve things, but it won’t change the fact that this problem would never have existed if not for selfish assholes who think they matter more than everybody else.
This is, of course, just one example – you see this behavior everywhere. This morning a car cut out of the lane in front of me and skipped a line at a traffic light… by driving in the bicycle lane ! I don’t even do that on my motorbike for fear of endangering school children – this person thinks they are so important that taking the risk of killing a schoolchild to save 5 minutes is worth it for them. The thing is… before the car turned out of the lane, I knew it would – I predicted it would – and which was the one car that did it. It was the expensive car with the GP number plate.
Now this is not to say that only GP cars do dangerous and selfish things. Most of the cars responsible for the above M5 example are Cape Townians. What is a fact though: is that if there is a dangerous and stupid act by which a selfish moron could save five minutes without regard for other peoples time and lives… and there is a GP car around one of the CA cars may do it- the GP car, without exception, will do it.
How sad… don’t you think ?
