Fellow South Coasters, what a pleasure it is being able to drive along well maintained tarred roads in this neck of the woods, without having your pothole-avoidance-driving-skills put to the test.
I have spoken previously about poorly maintained roads, which is blamed on the challenges concept because municipalities have not the finances to repair ageing road infrastructure. I can sympathise with that as having to do something with nothing is a challenge in itself, which would test the strongest of us on a sunny day indeed.
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Much as there are some potholes around and about Hibberdene, by no testing of your imagination, can you visualise the heavily cratered main streets in some of our smaller towns and dorps, that before the challenge crisis gained a following, were little jewels of prettiness and character.
I speak specifically of the dorp of Villiers, which when the N3 was built, the town was like a beached ship which gradually over the years became more and more dilapidated, forlorn and forgotten.
The roundabouts in the town are still there and the vacated shops, but the town has inherited the precursor of decay and destruction in the form of totally wrecked paved roads. Driving through the town is akin to taking a spin on Mars if I believe the photographs of its surface.
In fact, given the clarity of the photographs I think Mars has a better terrain on which to navigate in a wheeled vehicle. Just to note that Villiers is not the only town undergoing this lack of maintenance, it is endemic to many small towns in South Africa.
Taking a town as a unit, this deterioration of infrastructure falls into the Broken Window Theory, which indicates that when one window in a wall of windows is smashed, unless it is repaired speedily, it increases the chance of further decay.
I was therefore most excitedly surprised, to see how earnestly a contractor was overseeing the placement of Armco barriers along the side of the road en-route to Hibberdene.
This is wonderful indeed, as although the steel rail is not exceptionally high, it shall encourage the livestock which graze the verges to keep off the road, which will be a boon to the herdsman.
We actually had not seen this done before in our travels, as avoiding errant pedestrians sprinting across the lanes had been our main concern, now we had livestock to contend with. What a learning curve.
Anyway, road repair is important, I just wish the responsible municipality would replace the missing steel barrier that has gone AWOL from the river bridge the other side of Hibberdene. It is a danger and a car will fit through the gap very easily, so loss of life is an incentive to consider hastening its repair.
All in all though, the road system here is superb, as one must expect potholes and destroyed road surfaces to appear, as vehicles themselves have increased in mass and dimension with large width tyres to boot, remember the road construction specifications are probably from some years back and the road is trying its best to shoulder the heavier loads.
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