Last week, I participated in a “defensive driving course” at work. In line with similar courses in other countries, this course is focused on how to avoid accidents by driving defensively. A number of messages, such as scanning the road and looking at your rear view mirrors on a regular basis are in line with what I had learned before. However, there were some very “South African” messages in the course. The top 10 surprises for me were:
1. In case you were wondering, South Africa drives on the left hand side, similar to the UK.
2. You have to be very careful for people walking on the street, including (especially) on the highway! When you drive on a highway, you typically have a large number of people walking on either side of the road and regularly one of them decides to cross in front of a car that is driving at 120km (the speed limit). I am told that traditionally, the black population is not good at depth perception. The story goes that this is caused by being carried on the back while being babies and therefore not being trained on looking further away. Not sure how true that is, but either way regularly people get killed on the high-way because of collisions with cars. By the way, if you hit anyone, you are automatically charged with homicide until proven it is not your fault!
3. You want to keep your car door locked at all times. This avoids someone carjacking you while you are driving slowly or stopping in front of a traffic light.
4. It is an acceptable practice to drive through red traffic lights at nights … slowly and carefully of course. The reason for this is that you otherwise run the risk of being carjacked or otherwise attacked and by keeping moving that chance is dramatically reduced. This is much more common in large cities such as Johannesburg and Cape Town. East London seems to be very safe compared to the larger cities.
5. When there is a police road block, you want to be very alert to whether it is actually police stopping you. Apartently, there are occassions where a group decides to set up a fake police stop and then rob people when they stop! It is acceptable to ask for identification before opening your window or even pass the roadblock and report to the nearest police station instead!
6. You have to be careful for truckloads that are not attached very well. Regularly, there are loads that come apart and hit other cars.
7. Beware of the taxis! Taxis here are small minivans that pick people up along a route and drop them of somewhere else. They are one of the main form of public transport you find here and are almost exclusively used by the black population. The taxis usually are very crowded and seem to have their own driving style which does not take the other roadusers into consideration. So, it is not unusual that a taxi might suddenly stop in front of you or might suddenly make an unexpected turn.
8. Be careful for kids (or adults) on bridges that throw stones at cars. Again, this is not very common in East London, but particularly in the bigger cities kids sometimes drop stones onto cars. Sometimes just for fun, but sometimes also to stop the drivers so they can rob them!
9. It is acceptable in South Africa to drive on the shoulder (left of the yellow line) if you are a slow vehicle. However, the problem is that with all the people walking on the street (see earlier point), such cars cannot always stay there. That means that they are likely to suddenly jump out in front of regular road users.
10. As in so many other countries, there are some very aggressive drivers in South Africa. This includes suddenly passing on the left and jumping right in front of you. It also includes getting upset at other users and attacking them for their driving style. An important difference is that guns are quite common in South Africa!
All of this sounds probably worse that it is, but there are sure some interesting contrasts with other countries!
