Call to stop speeding grows

Editor

I AM writing in response to the article in last week’s Northglen News, dated 13 November and entitled, ‘Residents voice their frustration through sign’. Frustration is hardly the word I would use to describe the utter terror we feel as residents on Mackeurtan Avenue. The Virginia Circle is a Field’s Hill accident waiting to happen (as in September 2013).

The reasons are many, but certainly not ETA’S response of ‘poor driving behaviour’. It has everything to do with Mackeurtan Avenue being a mixed residential zone, serving the bus and taxi routes and the restaurants/pubs that have opened up the road.

I cannot count the number of times a day that the Durban Transport buses (green and white) scream past our homes, leaving us shaking, not in fear, but from the sheer force of their speed.
Our home is close to the bottom and mere metres away from the circle, which means that if the buses are still speeding past our home, then they enter the circle with this speed.
I pity the learner driver who is negotiating the circle at the same time as one of the municipal buses. And let’s think about the shoppers exiting Checkers from Mackeurtan Place and the school kids who use this route for their cross country practice. ‘Poor driving behaviour’? No, more like tanked-up motorists leaving the many restaurants up the road – I have jogged past these places at 3pm in the afternoon and witness drivers, almost legless with alcohol, getting behind the wheel.

The mind boggles at this madness and disregard for their lives and that of other road users. They simply do not care. Perversely, they only seem to accelerate as they go downhill towards the circle. Let’s not even talk about the silly, silly boys with their toys who feel the need to rev their engines all the way down the hill.
Please put in the traffic calming and force these rod hogs to drive slowly and safely past the high school, past our homes and families and in the circle so everyone can get home safely. Or the next time it will be their loved ones who are the victims in an accident at the Virginia Circle and then it will be too late.

Concerned Resident
Durban North