More than a bump in the road: a revolution

HERE is an apology to LWG 489GP, a nice-looking SUV. By “nice” I mean it projects a jaunty, friendly, vibe, where some SUVs like to look as if they’re fresh from the assault on Stalingrad.

I believe we’d be quite friendly, LWG, if we met in a decent way. But… well, when I cut in on you at the Lower Park robot, I bet you used short words that your mother never taught you.

So, LG – or may I say “Ellie’” for short? – I apologise. There, done.

Just that, I’d like you to recognise my, um, “grounds”. I’m sure you’ve known dark clouds inside your brow when the driver in front of you slows to walking speed at speed humps.

And darker clouds when they stop dead, and you yearn to shove a rocket up their exhaust.

But, heck, Ellie, I’d trailed you through six speed humps, and you didn’t just stop at each one, you stopped and meditated, or lit a smoke or filed a nail.

Despite, I never gave you the angry paaaarrrrp, loved by a wide school of Gauteng thought. I just gritted my teeth, silently employing some of those same short words.

At root, Ellie, I couldn’t blame you for more than your moments of meditation. That the humps flustered you was understandable. This was a crop of new humps.

Even locals, I know, are still trying to figure out which ones are reasonable gradients and which ones are clifffaces. And I can’t know that you are a local.

You may be a visitor from Putsonderwater, puzzled why godless Joburgers dig snakes’ graves in sideroads, graves for fat snakes and graves for thin snakes.

As a hospitable Jozi-person I tried to not disturb your contemplations.

But I admit that my Road Patience Threshold was pushing into the red, and when you selected the intersection as a fine scenic viewsite, well, an “ou” has a limit.

Mind, you do provide a public service. You reignite the great speed hump revolution, which was solemnly declared on this Stoep several weeks ago but has slithered down a cliff-face.

In confidence, I’ll admit that we Jozis are vrot revolutionaries. I’ve never even once seen General Mike Mayer, the hero of 11 speed-hump letters that the government couldn’t answer, stand up in the stirrups to draw a sword and yell “Charge!”

Part of our problem is bad focusing. People think the revolution is antihump. No, wrong, we’re eminently reasonable, if not much else.

We’re fine with sane humps that keep drivers from laying waste to 3-year-olds on tricycles. It’s the other ones that we want facing the firing squad of the SVLA, the Speed hump Victims Liberation Army.

The enemy is humps that break our silencers and our suspensions and slow the flow to zero. We rebel against inconsistency.

We want to know when we approach a hump that we can do it at 60, or perhaps a 40 if suitably marked.

We don’t want to wonder anything, let alone wonder whether this must be a 10km or 5km hump, or make our friendly, slightly tepidatious, Putsonderwater visitor slow to 0.

So, whisper it carefully, speed-hump war is re-declared. Not that we are making a big thing of this, Good Reader, we’re just making global history, is all, a rampaging thundering old-style newspaper campaign coming from the Stoep, a campaign to liberate our city from its (unique?) curse as victim of the evil speed bump.

Next step, we gather our weapons, being notebook and pen, and march upon the seat of Empire, aka the offices of Joburg Roads Agency.