Parking far more serious than dangerous driving
IT IS a little-known fact that parking on a sidewalk or a grass verge is an extremely dangerous offence – much more dangerous than overtaking on a solid white line or driving through red traffic lights and stop streets.
I base this opinion on my observation that I see people (including metro police and the SAPS) driving through red traffic lights and stop streets on a daily basis (often at high speed), yet I have never seen anyone being fined for these offences.
Twice now I have been at a red traffic light where I was the third or fourth car in the queue, and vehicles (once a delivery van and once a taxi) overtook all the cars on the wrong side of the road, and then cut diagonally through the traffic intersection, through the red lights and back onto the left side of the road.
Yet I have never even seen a traffic officer remotely near these extremely dangerous offences.
On the way to Durban and back from Amanzimtoti there are bus lanes where buses and taxis (which are limited to 100km/h by law) pass me at speeds greater than 120km/h.
In these same lanes I see cars pass me at speeds of probably 160km/h. Yet I have never seen anyone fined for these offences.
Now, on December 27, my family and I went to the Amanzimtoti beach, where there were a number of metro police vehicles, and the parking area was swarming with metro cops.
One person asked a metro policewoman why she was fining the motorcycles on the pavement, and she replied that it was “illegal to park here”.
How is it the metro police can put so much time and energy into fining people for doing something which is not a danger to anyone, and who park in these places because the eThekwini council has not provided adequate parking, and totally neglect dangerous motoring offences?
The answer, I suppose, is that fining the illegal parkers renders maximum revenue for minimum effort because it is always about revenue and never about road safety, is it not?
It is simply a disgrace!