Where the streets have no shame

The audacity was cold, the violence banal, the implication that people not in cars do not belong on the street. And that if they thought they did they deserved inconvenience.

Telford Vice / Cape Town

FEW of Joburg’s spiffier spaces are as hostile to humans as the noisy, nasty, gnarly bit of Atholl Oaklands Road between Corlett Drive and the M1. Pavements, where they exist, are hump-backed and cobbled, making them tedious to traverse and, in the wet, treacherous. The road rules. Pedestrian, you’re on your own.

Melrose Arch, snug behind its security and smug in its New Urbanism, skulks along one side of the street. The other is crowded with walled and guarded residential complexes, a rich row of rancorous resistance.

The other month I walked from Melrose Arch to rancour row to hand back the keys to an Airbnb. The traffic light was working! Only two of the oncoming cars at the head of the three lanes growled to a halt over the stop line! The one that stopped behind the line was not rear-ended!

I was still marvelling at all this when I discovered that the pedestrian crossing ended not with a polite ramp onto the pavement. Instead, the parallel white lines led to a perpendicular wall a metre high.

The audacity was cold, the violence banal, the implication that people not in cars do not belong on the street. And that if they thought they did they deserved inconvenience. What if they were in a wheelchair? Or on crutches? I know of whence I speak.

On April 27 last year we were walking in Cape Town’s village principality of Sea Point, where we are privileged enough to live. A car coming along Main Road turned right through a red light and almost took us out. As it passed I slapped it on the back fender. The car stopped with a jerk, the jerk got out, and he and I indulged in verbal toxic masculinity to, I thought, settle the score.

But he followed us in the car for two blocks, turned at an intersection, alighted, and walked into me. It needed a push to get him off, which gave him the excuse to punch me in the face. I fell over the pavement and broke my ankle.

Hence the crutches. With them came a moonboot and nine pieces of titanium that suggest, when I look at the x-ray, that someone has deconstructed the Eiffel Tower inside my ankle. I also acquired medical bills of around R100,000.

The crutches and moonboot are now behind a bookcase, the hole in our bond account is being filled, and I’ve regained the full use of my ankle. But the titanium will be with me forever. So will the disbelief that despite knowing the car’s registration number and, through sleuthing, the driver’s name and his cellphone number, the legal advice is that there’s little I can do to recover the money.

I’m proudly and happily car-free. I get around on a bicycle and I’m reminded daily that I am a second-class citizen on our third-class streets. After the assault I was asked many times: “Were you on your bicycle?” Now I’m told many times: “Don’t fight with cars.”

Had I been on my bike I would have avoided the road rager, and how about drivers don’t fight with other users of roads; roads that were there long before cars? Poor street design leads to poor behaviour. Worse, it leads to poor thinking.

Visi Magazine