Overshoot

I saw this tweet and it reminded me about a post I’ve been meaning to write for a while now.

Because, the thing is that you can’t just run the pedestrian over, much as you’d probably like to. You’d get into trouble, sure, but worse than that, we’re still struggling with water restrictions here in Cape Town and people would frown if they saw you washing the bits of skull, brain and matted hair off your bonnet.

So you have to slow down. And then they’ve won.
And then they use that technique to cross the road every time.

But pedestrians aren’t the only ones to utilise this method to get where they need to be. Our local (and already notoriously shit) drivers are doing it too.

They’ve worked out that if they approach a stop sign on a side road at a appropriately foolish speed, and perhaps overshoot the white line by, say maybe just 50cm, then any vehicles on the main road they are joining will have to slow down, rather than risk an accident.

And, like the pedestrian above, once you’ve slowed down, they’ll take advantage of the situation to complete their nefarious manoeuvre.

Newlands Road in Claremont is nice and straight and has a plethora of sideroads where one can witness this action taking place at several junctions within a single 500m stretch. It’s also where I remind myself that I must blog about this each evening, before doing nothing about it.

The perpetrators are relying on your knowledge that Cape Town drivers are so rubbish that they might actually just completely ignore a stop sign and plough into your car. And so if you try and call their bluff, there’s always a reasonable chance that a rubbish driver might actually just completely ignore a stop sign and plough into your car.

I do recognise that – short of asking you nicely not to do it – there’s not much that I can do about halting this practice.
But at least I have now documented it.

Have you experienced this? Is it merely a Cape Town phenomenon?
Are you an overshooter? If so, why do you do it, you twat?

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