OFF THE WIRE
BY: Dave Abrahams
iol.co.za
Even when there is absolutely no room for error, such as here on Chapmans Peak, the typical South African car driver will tend to fall off the inside of a corner. Picture: David Ritchie
The defining characteristic of South African drivers is not, as you might think, creeping the lights. The practice of easing forward into an intersection while waiting for a red light to turn green, seems rather to be a Cape Town thing.
I've seldom seen it done elsewhere in the country, other than by taxi drivers - all of whom seem to regard a red light as a personal challenge! - and, by and large, drivers beyond the Boland seem to understand that to stop at a red light and then creep forward over the line while waiting for the lights to change will get you the same fine as not stopping at all.
No, the defining characteristic of South African drivers is falling off the inside of a corner.
I've seen it everywhere in South Africa, from Aberdeen to Zesfontein, in big cities and no-horse towns (have you ever been to Tweebuffelsmeteenkoeelmorsdoodgeskietfontein?) and everywhere the pattern is the same. The typical South African driver will turn into a bend or corner too early and too slowly.
The vehicle's inside wheels will drift into the gutter (if it's a left turn) or across the white line into the oncoming lane (if the corner is to the right) with metronomic regularity. It's even worse on multilane roads, where entire convoys of cars, buses and trucks will drift in unison across the lane markings towards the inside of the bend - every time.
And yet, as a motorcyclist, you can turn that to your advantage, particularly on a right turn. More often than not, as the cars drift towards the inside of the corner, they leave enough space on the outside of their lane for a motorcycle to overtake them in complete safety, bearing in mind that it is legal for a motorcycle to overtake a car in the same lane but not vice versa.
There's one S-bend on my daily ride to work where I regularly overtake one car on the right as it goes through the left-hander and then move across to pass the next one on the left around on the right-hander. And never once, in nine years of riding the same route five days a week, has a car driver held his line to make me run wide.
They flash their headlights, blast me with their hooters and, if their windows happen to be open, teach me interesting new phrases, but steer accurately around a corner? Aikona.
I've driven in Europe, North America and the Far East and I've never seen this phenomenon anywhere else (no, I lie; I saw a delivery-van driver do it in Camden Town - but it turned out he was from Durban). Drivers in first-world countries seem to learn accurate steering along with hill-starts and parallel parking.
Is this because it's extremely difficult (if not downright impossible) in those countries, to pass a driving licence test without attending a professional driving school? Whereas here in South Africa we inherit the bad habits and poor techniques of the fathers and older brothers who teach us to drive - and carry these bad habits through licence tests administered by drivers who learned the same way.
The K53 licence programme is a praiseworthy attempt to raise the standard of driver instruction in South Africa, but it doesn't teach driving; it teaches candidates how to manoeuvre around a car park. And so, until learner drivers are taught how to steer a car on a real road, I'll continue to go round the outside.
