South Africa is the most dangerous country in the world to drive in

Remove taxis and we'll climb into the Top easily...
 
JuliusSeizure said:
There are a number of factors, the taxis are one of them. Another is overloaded and overworked truck drivers. We can reduce the number of trucks by developing a rail system to transport goods (there was talk that the Chinese were working on this) but it is going to come with violence if it happens sadly as a lot of truck company owners are violent thugs.

The other issue is people who just drive badly because they bought their licences.
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But the Transnet CEO said she wont do, as it would put some truck drivers out of a job.
 
porchrat said:
Dudes that did that survey have clearly never been to Egypt.

They don't have 4-way stops in that country, let alone traffic lights.
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Well we have traffic lights that sometimes work and are affected by load shedding, we also have 4 way stops. However there concepts seem to elude the "I'm so cool" Polo driver types. They seem to think that you should go and only stop if someone else is exercising their right of way as it was their turn to go. And don't get into an argument with these dim 2 brain cell individuals. Their smooth brains always win because they possess no logic.
 
elf_lord_ZC5 said:
How many here, totally ignore your traffic lights entirely?
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Here in the Western Cape? Pretty much just the taxis, maybe one out of every tenth driver on a bad day, and even then they all slow to check for traffic before proceeding because deep down they still value their own lives.

You ever seen an Egyptian intersection?
 
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Mekon said:
Well we have traffic lights that sometimes work and are affected by load shedding, we also have 4 way stops. However there concepts seem to elude the "I'm so cool" Polo driver types. They seem to think that you should go and only stop if someone else is exercising their right of way as it was their turn to go. And don't get into an argument with these dim 2 brain cell individuals. Their smooth brains always win because they possess no logic.
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OK you're starting to get a small inkling what life in the rest of Africa is like.

So now I want you to imagine that everybody on the road is like that Polo driver, even the pedestrians, even the pets, but with even less of a sense of their own self preservation, maybe triple it. Now I want you to imagine that not just the traffic lights don't work sometimes... instead every single motorist that's lived for the last 50+ years has never even seen a functioning traffic light in their lifetimes. The very concept of something controlling traffic flow at an intersection, other than an unholy ramshackle equation involving the size of your chassis and how little you value your own life, is something they don't grasp.

The only way someone can say SA's roads are worse is if they've never travelled anywhere that's really fscked in Africa. There's no other explanation other than ignorance.
 
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JuliusSeizure said:
There are a number of factors, the taxis are one of them. Another is overloaded and overworked truck drivers. We can reduce the number of trucks by developing a rail system to transport goods (there was talk that the Chinese were working on this) but it is going to come with violence if it happens sadly as a lot of truck company owners are violent thugs.

The other issue is people who just drive badly because they bought their licences.
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Yeah rail system would be a massive bonus. But the problem is money, trucking families earning millions won't just let a rail system take over. That's a problem in a few countries i think.
 
Sinbad said:
I got to sit in the front passenger seat of a taxi in Cairo.
I screamed. More than once.
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A big 4x4 for VIPs in Yemen did not help either, especially considering you could see it had been repaired a few times before. The biggest had a right of way, my driver thought otherwise. :ROFL:
 
neoprema said:
Yeah rail system would be a massive bonus. But the problem is money, trucking families earning millions won't just let a rail system take over. That's a problem in a few countries i think.
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Very violent people as well. There will be bloodshed if the trucking businesses in SA are threatened.
 
Another thing to also factor in here is hijacking/carjacking. SA has pretty high rates of that compared to most places.
 
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