Fine, drive me round the bend

My grown-up daughter doesn’t have a driver’s licence. She can drive but she won’t go for the test. I have begged and threatened, but it’s no use. Then I thought maybe it’s a good thing. She is, you see, something of a cloud pony. And we don’t need any more of those on the roads.

You’ve seen them. One might have already driven into you. They are the easily distracted. The people who begin wondering what it would be like to fly or breathe underwater. They might glance at you at the traffic lights but they won’t see you. They are imagining themselves as a dolphin. They probably see you as an orca.

When my daughter was fourteen, I let her drive while we were in Etosha National Park. It started off well, with her cranking up the music, mowing through the gears, drifting around corners and laughing crazily like a true professional. It was a wonderful bonding moment. Right up until I told her to pull in at a waterhole. We both got distracted by some kind of orgiastic feeding frenzy down at the water’s edge and she forgot to steer. And brake. The Italian tourists were surprised to find a faded red Hyundai spontaneously attaching itself to the bull bar of their giant beast of a Toyota. Theirs was left with barely a scratch while my bonnet neatly folded itself into an A-frame.

My point is that cloud ponies shouldn’t drive and yet the roads are full of them. The latest JMPD performance report said that reckless and negligent driving was the leading cause of accidents in the month under review. I can believe it. Too many drivers pay about as much attention to the road as they do to to paying their e-toll bills. Motorists who cause accidents through negligence need to be sent to concentration camps. Relax. I’m talking about camps where you learn to concentrate on what’s happening around you.

An addiction to cellphones, social media and lesbian porn has affected our ability to focus for more than three minutes at a time. Accidents happen when our minds are elsewhere. And the new demerit system is not going to make drivers any less attention deficit. All it will do is take a vicious financial toll on people who get flashed by camera traps, don’t use seatbelts and park in loading zones, all of which I do regularly without anyone getting hurt.

Do you know how many drivers the JMPD arrested for reckless or negligent driving in one month? Fifteen. That should be an afternoon’s work for your average semi-sentient traffic cop.

There is, however, something a lot easier and way more lucrative than waddling off to an intersection. Let the speed traps do all the work. A staggering 873 560 fines were issued in the same period. Maximum payout, minimal effort. It should be on South Africa’s coat of arms.

A total of 790 people were arrested for driving under the influence. Is that all? I have never been done for DUI. Have I driven over the legal limit? Of course I have. In this country you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who hasn’t. Virtually every car parked outside every bar, restaurant or club will later that evening be driven by someone over the limit. Sure, there might be one or two designated drivers among the herd, but these are like unicorns.

There’s a fatal flaw in the system. It takes just a couple of drinks to put you over the limit and yet bartenders will happily keep serving you alcohol even as it leaks from every orifice in your body.

Roadblocks are more of a problem than drinking and driving. Our social lives are being ruined. Everyone is too terrified to go out at night for fear of ending up with a criminal record or having their bottom interfered with by a fighting general in the 28s. Thanks to the police, it’s just not safe to be on the roads at night.

I would venture that 99.9% of people who regularly drive after a few sociable drinks manage to do so without veering into oncoming traffic or slamming into a lamppost. They might be breaking the law, but they get home perfectly safely without endangering their or anyone else’s lives. And they have been doing it for years. Statistics on the number of accidents caused by people driving over the limit are hard to come by.

I don’t think the poetically named Administrative Adjudication of Road Traffic Offences Amendment Bill is going to do much to curb drinking and driving. For a start, when the word ‘amendment’ appears in the same sentence as ‘road traffic offences’, you just know it’s not going to be a sensible modification such as one that encourages people to drive stoned rather then drunk because weed makes you incapable of going faster than 50km/h. Or one that allows men to drink and drive if they are taller than 1.9m and weigh 100kg because we, I mean, they, can obviously hold their alcohol a lot better than your average schoolgirl.

In Britain and America, police generally need reasonable grounds to suspect a driver is intoxicated before requesting a breath test. In many countries you’re given three tests, including standing on one leg and walking heel to toe in a straight line. If you fail all three, then you get breathalysed. Seems fair enough. But we don’t get that option here. I might be marginally over the limit, but if I can close my eyes and touch my nose or the cop’s nose or any other body part of his choosing, followed by an arabesque and two grand jetés on the white line, I should be allowed to proceed unhindered.

In the US, several states currently disallow sobriety roadblocks on the grounds that they are a violation of the Fourth Amendment, which deals with violations of privacy without probable cause. Other states require police to take out notices in local newspapers notifying people where and when the roadblocks will be set up.

Look, I’m not endorsing drunk driving, but I am asking the police to be a little more flexible when it comes to ever-so-slightly-tipsy driving. Nail the heavily wasted, by all means, but stop ruining the lives of the lightly euphoric.

If things carry on as they are, we might as well move to Saudi Arabia. Or, worse, Australia.

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