RD Winfield, Lakeside
In civilized countries, for many years, traffic authorities have struggled to handle increasing traffic loads.
They have gone a long way towards speeding up traffic flow by eliminating stop streets and traffic lights and installing roundabouts and give ways. In London there are urgent calls to further reduce traffic lights by using mini roundabouts as well as full size ones.
In South Africa what do we do? Despite rapidly increasing traffic congestion, we put up more and more traffic lights and stop streets where they serve no purpose at all except to slow traffic. From Constantia Village to Main Road, Wynberg, there are now seven sets of lights.
The new lights in Sun Valley are a total disaster and a roundabout would have been far more efficient.
In the village in which I live, the council has recently installed a three-way stop and a four-way. Both intersections worked fine as they were and the costly conversions are not only an unnecessary expense but utterly useless to the extent that 90% of drivers completely ignore them.
When oh when will our authorities take heed of worldwide trends and stop doing things their way? I suspect we spend tax payers’ money on sending people overseas to study trends only for them to return and ignore what they have seen. Wake up for goodness sake.