Traffic gridlock costs drivers a fortune

IT SEEMS no one is immune to the load shedding.

This offsets all the good work President Ramaphosa has been marketing across the globe in his recent addresses to world leaders. But has Eskom considered the financial and other implications of such an act for the country’s citizens?

During load shedding, traffic lights are out. Selfish drivers cross into intersections believing that such a move will allow them to arrive a little earlier at work. Little do they realise that their actions are responsible for everybody arriving at work later than usual. Cars stuck in intersections obstruct traffic perpendicular to their direction of movement, resulting in traffic coming to a standstill.

Had the drivers waited at the traffic light when it changed to red, the intersection would have been clear and this would have allowed cross traffic to continue freely. An intersection blocked with stationary vehicles allows no traffic to flow, resulting in everybody being stuck far longer than is usually the case when traffic lights are functioning.

Since load shedding, drivers have reported taking two or three times longer to get to and from work. This doubles or triples the petrol cost of a household a month.

Was this taken into account before it was decided to implement load shedding?

Also, I haven’t seen traffic cops at the intersections I drive through.

At the tertiary institution where I work, the electricity of new buildings are backed up with generators. But this is not the case with all buildings. Lecture halls, computer laboratories and other seminar rooms cannot be used when the electricity is down.

So load shedding impacts negatively on the delivery of lectures, tutorials, practicals and tests. Could this eventually lead to a lowering of standards?

It is pathetic that we are experiencing load shedding, water restrictions, service delivery protests and looming exorbitant electricity tariff increases when the government for the people is supposedly in charge? Couldn’t they have learnt from the previous apartheid government and stolen but left enough for the country to still function properly?