My second ‘life’ on the road

There I was, sporting generous amounts of grey hair as a fortysomething, sitting next to wide-eyed teenagers less than halve my age.

The place was the Randburg Civic Centre and the event a random weekday-morning K53 learner’s licence test.

I couldn’t help sympathising with the stressed youngsters as I was once in their shoes going through the process of learning how to drive a car.

Now, almost three decades later, I made my return to the examination room to try and obtain a learner’s licence to ride a motorcycle.

The impulsive purchase of a motorbike at a discounted family price over a Christmas braai left me pursuing a life-long ambition kept on the back burner for far too long.

But before I could take the blue Kawasaki now standing in my garage for a spin, it was time for the logical next step. A learner’s licence.

Starting this process turned out to be much easier than anticipated. You select a date and time during a simple online booking procedure which is then confirmed by virtue of a physical visit and R108 booking fee payment at the traffic department.

Now there was only one thing left to do before the exam and that was to brush up on the three sections of the test: vehicle operations,road signs and rules of the road. The familiar K53 test manual had me going through each road sign and rule of the road and set me off on strange journey.

Strange because when I first studied for the test in high school, I was completely inexperienced at operating a vehicle on our roads. I was impressionable and keen on learning what everybody else on the road are adhering to. Or at least what I thought they adhered to.

After spending the last 29 years of my life behind a steering wheel almost on a daily basis, a brush-up on the theoretic meaning of the rules of the road and traffic signs is very contradictory to what happens in practice.

For instance, motorists should slow down when a traffic lights turns yellow and stop when it turns red. Based on my daily observations, I was made to believe that a yellow light means accelerate with a red light indicating your last chance to jump the intersection.

As it turns out, a vehicle is also supposed to stop before a white line painted on the road next to a stop sign. Not even to mention vehicles must drive off from a four-way stop street in the sequence that they arrived. You could have fooled me.

And apparently there’s this official speed limit arrangement of 60km/h in urban areas and120km/h on freeways. Well I’ll be damned. I kind of accepted that those signs indicated the minimum speed allowed on those particular roads.

Then we get to rules which seem to purely exist to annoy minibus taxi drivers and rob them of express passenger-hauling income.

It turns out they can’t just stop anywhere, make U-turns across solid white lines and that passengers they drove past is not a proper excuse for reversing 100m on a public road.

Which leads us to the ultimate insult for taxi drivers. No vehicle is permitted to drive on the wrong side of the road. How can they pick up passengers on the other side of the road then?

This oom left the exam room before the laaities and another R60 poorer as the proud owner of a learner’s licence for a bike, yet utterly confused.

I’m stuck with a decision for my second “life” on the road during which I’ll be operating two-and four-wheelers.

Do I try and stick to the rules and try fight a lost cause, or do I accept reality in order to protect my sanity? It’s a no-brainer.