After-hours Beach Road mayhem needs more planning

EDITOR – What a Boxing Day it was at Toti’s Rogies Park

It was a beautiful morning, hot and humid, encouraging residents and visitors to go down to the beach to suntan and swim in the warm Indian Ocean.

The traffic flow in Beach Road was reasonable and uncongested, thanks to the local police and imposed permit requirement restrictions. That was if the stated permit kiosk was manned and open and had sufficient forms to issue at the required times.

All’s well, the redirection of overloaded mass transport vehicles has been successful, traffic in Beach road is reasonable with no double parking, residents from the surrounding areas were disembarked at close staging points and walked to the main seaside attraction points in and around Rogies Park, with their usual joyful singing and chatter. The noise from the revellers got progressively loud as the day progressed, becoming annoyingly loud in the later afternoon, resulting from the teenage couples, having stood in long queues at the local barricaded liquor store, finally consuming their purchases in the Rogies Park area and depositing the empty cans and bottles with their bladder content whereever they happened to be, together with any paper or plastic packages. Is drinking in public now legal?

Then it all happens – the local police go off duty at about 6pm, open up the traffic restrictions to Beach Road and the unloaded mass transport vehicles enter, double and triple parking, each with built in music centres set at maximum volume, attracting the singing, jiving, drunk passengers who seem to get pleasure in rocking the transport vehicles and making a general nuisance of themselves.

The saving grace was the white-haired police officer who, soaked to the skin, stood in the rain to create some form of order in the passenger pick-up areas while most of his colleagues sat in their vehicles. Finally at about 11.30pm two police vehicles arrived at Rogies Park and cleared the revellers from the area.

What a culture shock, to see what was a well-groomed Rogies Park the following morning with bottles, papers and debris everywhere. Of the eight provided metal refuse bins, seven were empty.

There were a few other well-behaved visitors who did not indulge in the madness.

Andre Beetge and co, you did OK, but further organised improvement is required.

DSW