All lives matter – please make Tarragona safe!
One only needs to spend a half hour or so at the side of Tarragona road opposite the township housing to witness its potential as a death trap every bit as lethal as a minefield. In the past week at least two dogs have been killed and it is only a matter of time before a child becomes a victim.
A general lawlessness seems to have prevailed in St Francis and even Cape St Francis of late. It seems now that our visitors have returned to their provinces, cities and towns of residence, St Franciscans can now live by their own laws and ignore speed limits and other traffic laws. Travel along St Francis Drive at the speed limit of 50 KPH and it’s almost a certainty that you will be passed by a vehicle, and not just a car or bakkie, but even a three-ton truck, or truck/car with a trailer.
And so it is in Tarragona! Even the huge 10-tonners ignore the speed limit, yield and stop signs along Tarragona. But here there is an added hazard – small children.
Certainly most of the kids that play along Tarragona are pretty ‘streetwise’ but it takes only a momentary loss of their survival instincts and we have a catastrophe of serious injury or worse still, a death.
So the driver of the vehicle responsible for killing a child goes to prison for culpable homicide and his family suffer the consequence of losing a breadwinner but society has punished the villain. But society allowed to happen and those responsible for making us safe, law enforcement, consider their job done. But here’s the twist! Maybe they too should be held responsible and also prosecuted for not ensuring that all that is possible is done to prevent the disaster in the first place.
One can almost guarantee that if the head of traffic in the Kouga region faced even the slightest chance of possible prosecution should a child be killed on Tarragona for not ensuring everything possible was in place to prevent speeding, we would have speed calming devices every 50 metres along Tarragona between the industrial area and the housing. And no doubt the council would make it a priority if there was the slightest chance of a slick city lawyer suing the municipality rather than the Road Accident Fund.
A timely article indeed. There is a mindset in SFB/CFS that switches off common sense and all respect for traffic laws. A two minute drive to the Spar from here, will inevitably reveal drivers ignoring stop siigns, drivers swerving across St Francis Drive to avoid a small hump and of course, drivers with cell phones stuck against their ear. It is not uncomon to see women actually reversing out of parking bays talking on their phones!
Since there is little hope of controlling the lunacy in Tarragona, it would seem appropriate for the authorities to install speed humps as suggested, with bollards to prevent drivers swerving around them, together with fixed speed cameras.