IT is matric dance season in the Upper Highway area and besides the dress, the next most important thing is the arrival. If you get those two items on the list right then you are on the road to success.
I own a few vintage cars and sometimes hire them out or do friends a favour by taking their matriculant and partner to their dance.
Like others who hire out their cars, I get calls or messages saying can you drop off my daughter at her dance it will only take five minutes or its only 100m to the drop off point, or can you do it for R500. So let’s see what it all entails.
At 4pm I get the car out and give it a wash. On route to the dance, I fill up with R200 petrol. I am at the pre-drinks just after 5pm for a few photos to be taken with the car.
We leave for the school at 5.45pm to get into the queue for the first arrival scheduled at 6pm.
The queue is already one kilometre long. So we sit in this stop-start traffic for more than an hour before we do our drop off. Just after 7pm we have completed our drop off then we head home. Put the car away in its garage, it is now nearly 8pm.
So that five minutes took close to four hours with the learners in the back getting stressed out that they are now late. That 100m was actually 30km with the 1km of stop-start traffic taking its toll on the driver and the car.
That R500 after taking off for just petrol yielded the driver R300 giving them R75 per hour.
Where can you hire an expensive piece of equipment and skilled operator for R75 per hour?
I would also like to ask the various schools to look at the way they do their arrivals. To have one long queue does not work.
If I can commend Kloof High, being a big school in terms of numbers, for its outstanding effort to assist with arrivals. Cars were allowed to all meet on their bottom field and as one car entered the school to do the drop-off another one was released off the field.
Well done Kloof.
Transportation Engineer
Kloof
