Tuesday, 24 June 2014

E-Toll Protest - Farting against thunder.

As a resident of Jozi for a number of years, i have experienced all the thrills and depressing moments of travelling on the highways in and around the Metropolis. I have lived through the peak hour traffic, the disaster that was rush hour in 2008, when Eskom fell asleep on the job, and a 40 minute commute became a 4 hour crawl. The promises of a high-speed rail connection, the Shilowa express, came to fruition in the Gautrain and the revamped highways around Jozi. The dawning realization that the grossly inflated cost of the freeways would result in increased cost to each motorist led to the spontaneous e-Toll free campaign with its ubiquitous orange stickers and snarky remarks about SANRAL ,(the roads agency tasked with the maintenance and building of roads) and Nazir Alli, the abrasive CEO of SANRAL. Sadly, these protests are mostly ineffective and more a case of making the middle class motorist, who is most likely the party who will be likely to use the tollroads, build up a considerable unpaid balance with SANRAL. In my opinion, the costs will sooner or later be extracted from the pocket of the motorist, with regulatory connivance of the authorities. Complaining is not going to help.

Tempus fugit

Time flies when you are having fun. only just noticed that four years have passed since my last post on the blog. One divorce and three relationships later, here we are. Older, greyer, balder and to be brutally frank, not much wiser.