h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

In South Africa there are two kinds of drivers, The good and law-abiding type (mostly young women in their late teens and tourists) and raging maniacs (everyone else, including yours truly).

The good drivers are good for one reason only: young ladies and tourists have usually only recently started to drive on South African roads and are very afraid of getting into trouble. Everyone else has learned that laws are for sissies.

The aforementioned raging maniacs fall into this category for various reasons.

Weapons:
Most (if not all) drivers in this country are armed, for various reasons and with various weapons. This obsession with weapons is mostly for protection against carjackers. Carjacking is something of an industry here. The one exception is taxis, where the biggest threat is other taxis. Take heart in the knowledge that if you are not armed, your car will do as a substitute weapon. Most panelbeaters in this country do not ask questions.

Etiquette of the road:
A few "unpublished rules" are used here. One of the popular ones is a game known as road tag. In this game everyone tries to be in front of everyone else. Even people with 22 year old Ford Escorts will push their ancient mounts to the limit to try and be in front of that Mercedes or BMW ahead of them. Of course once you are in front the game is won and you can slack off again. The drivers behind will swear at you and use universally recognised hand signals to convey their understanding. It is also fun to drive a fast BMW and to see a driver of an old ford desperately trying to overtake you.

The game gets interesting when an 18-wheeler truck joins in. A truck driver's understanding of "overtaking" is to pull alongside you and then to start changing lanes. That is what hard shoulders were invented for. It gets even more interesting when a truck tries to overtake another truck.

Of course there is an omnipresent danger of traffic police (called "speed cops"). The fines for speeding can be wallet-busting and if you are caught in the 150-200Kph range you can loose your freedom (read: Jail). So dont get caught.

Driving in the City:
South Africa has many cities so i will cover the major ones.

Pretoria:
A relatively easy drive if you are a local. However visitors will get confused by the fact that almost all streets are one way. Plus the main street is closed to traffic. A car standing still in a street is usually a lost tourist.

Johannesburg:
Busy narrow streets in the city centre is offset by massive, fast-moving freeways around it. Keep your wits about you and you might just stay alive. Dont make eye-contact with any other driver. Due to the mining in the area the road occasionally collapses into a sinkhole.

Durban:
Imagine people driving along an open highway at high speed. Now imagine the same people in a busy city. Add to that the fact that almost all the street signs are 50 years out of date and that there are always new intersections and onramps being built. Even seasoned veterans get lost once a week. The problem gets extreme around the winter holiday, when the entire county tries to fit into the Durban city limits (Durban being the country's premier holiday destination during winter).


Cape Town:
Same as Durban, except that about 90% of all the cars are white, adding to the confusion. Plus there is this really big mountain slap bang in the middle of the city. The icing on the cake is that the city, being so famous, is usually brimming with foreign tourists, half of which are lost at any given time, the other half heading straight for the Waterfront.

It looks like you just wrote the definitive ariticle for Driving Etiquette - South Africa. Why don't you post it as an entry and submit it for peer review?

As a proud Joburger I have to comment, though, that Capetonians and everybody in Natal () has the tendency to drive rather sloowwly. I guess its all a question of relativity!

As a daily commuter between Pretoria and Johannesburg, I must add my bit about the highway driving. In SA, we drive on the left side, and the highways are usually two-lane freeway types. As a result, the left lane is the "slow" lane and the right lane the "fast" or overtaking lane.
Now everybody is always trying to overtake everyone else, so the typical scenario is one where the right lane (i.e. the "fast" lane) has a string of vehicles travelling less than one car's length apart. This is due to the fact that if you leave more than a car's length between you and the car in front of you, someone from the "slow" left lane will immediately enter the gap to try to overtake someone else.
This results in a "fast" lane that is bumper to bumper and a "slow" lane that is virtually vacant, except for a few slow-pokes and one or two heavy vehicles a few kilometres apart. So I travel restfully in the "slow" lane, usually some 20 kilometres per hour faster than the lemmings in the "fast" lane.
Now and again I will need to overtake a slower vehicle, but prudent matching of speed and approach will usually find me a slacker in the "fast" lane (chatting animately on their cellphone or changing CD's) and dropping 4 or 5 car lengths behind. This permits me to sneak into the "fast" lane, overtake the 18 wheeler and safely merge back into the left lane again.
So, in South Africa, fast=slowest and slow=faster - as far as lanes goes, that is!

Traffic lights are called "robots" in SA. Now the bane of our lives are the thousands of mini-bus type taxis who cater to the public transport needs of the 'car-less' masses. They stop anywhere at anytime to offload or upload passengers and are always in a great hurry to get wherever so they can offload, upload and get going back again. At traffic lights, they always will run the red. I am daily being faced with the sight of a green traffic light for me but having to wait while two or three taxi's turn into the intersection from the side street. These taxi's will then turn on their hazard warning lights and stop just past the intersection to offload or upload more passengers!
In the other direction, a taxi will also take careful note of the crossing traffic light, launching on the red in order to cross the intersection before the green, usually changing lanes in the process. Sadly, more often than not, a green-jumper meets a red-runner and the intersection is blocked by the dismembered vehicles and everyone else gets to work late.
Just a work of warning: red means "stop" (unless there's a taxi travelling directly behind you), green means "go" and yellow means "go faster". When you stop at a red light, do so with a car-length to spare in front and immediately look into your rear-view mirror. If the car (or taxi) behind you isn't going to make the stop, you may need that space to launch forward and avoid being rear-ended.
And if you ride a motorcycle (as I do) you must be even more aware of the above. You will rapidly realise that a driver's IQ is divided by the square of number of wheels they travel on and the cube of the number of passengers they are carrying with them.
Happy motoring!

And when another car almost humps your car from behind that means "Get the heck offa the road onto the side line, couldn't you see me coming? Got no rear mirror, have you? Got your licence from a Sangoma, did you?"
The polite thing to do is watch the rear mirror at all times and the moment a speck appears in it and comes hurtling up behind you, draw over at once, and hopefully there's no pedestriants, goats or horse wagons on that sideline, and then after he's roared past you he'll sweetly flash all indicators saying "thank you thank goodness" and you flash back sayin' "My pleasure".
When somebody overtakes in the face of oncoming traffic, and you are that oncoming traffic, you just get the heck offa the road without havin' any thanks flashed at you, but you can thank heaven you're still alive.

So - you remember just how to drive in SA?

To drive and thus to survive... I ain't likely to forget it!

I have today noticed that the minibus taxi drivers have graduated to driving Johannesburg Metro buses! The taxi traffic aerobics (jump-the-green and run-the-red) seem to be creeping in there too!