Heavy Cape Town traffic due to railway strike

The nationwide railway strike this week has been causing some heavy traffic in the morning and evening here in Cape Town. All of the train commuters had to find alternative modes of transport. I came with my car this week and it turns out to be rather expensive what petrol concerns. Sitting in traffic double the time than it should take is also no fun. I am at this point in time considering getting a bicycle and ride to work while getting some much needed cardio done. In the evenings the trains are also sometimes unreliable by not always showing up. In the evenings it would probably be a little bit faster to get home by bicycle than train due to the 25 minute walk in the evening if I do not manage to catch the 18:15 train leaving Cape Town.

Countrywide train strike on Monday

This coming Monday (10 May 2010) is going to be a countrywide train strike. There will be thick traffic on the roads for days. It will be expensive for petrol. Metrorail was already refunding all of the monthly train tickets. At least two unions are striking over a wage dispute.

Steam update getting killed by internet cap stops gaming

A friend of mine had the bad luck yesterday (Sunday, 14 March 2010) that his monthly international internet banwidth usage cap was used up while the Steam game client was doing updates. Steam was refusing to start properly because it wanted to finish the update. This meant that he could not play any games in Steam. No software is made to handle partial updates like this and be happy about it. Either it is a matter of being offline or a matter of being online and not some inbetween state. The matter was resolved by him having to take his PC to me to use my internet connection for teh remaining 2MB. Telkom used to throttle the international internet traffic down to about 800 bytes persecond, but not anymore.

Dangerous Cape Town drivers

This last weekend I observed two incidents where drivers in Cape Town were driving dangerously.

One case was as follows:

In the 80km/h zone on the N1, I moved one lane to the right while keeping a good following distance to the car in front of me, but not big enough to fit another car including a good following distance. I was driving just under, but close to the speed limit.

The next moment a car was trying to squeeze into the gap in front of me, but coming so that our cars would collide. The car was also not using indicators. Shortly after this the car was rapidly changing lanes and driving much faster than other cars.

At the traffic light ahead with the left turn that same car was yet again pushing others to the side. They mostly moved to prevent accidents. A bit further ahead after the turn on Oswald Pirow street, I caught up with it at the traffic light.

Once the traffic light went green every car started moving except for that one, which took a while to start. When it finally started, it went speeding up the bridge ahead that goes over the railway tracks and past Cape Town station to the traffic light with Good Hope Centre on the left.

That traffic light has two lanes going right which end up in two lanes. The traffic light was red and that car was on the right lane and another one on the left, both wanted to turn right. When the traffic light turned green, that car started to change lanes in the turn on to the left lane and forcing the car on the left lane to brake to prevent a collision. After this it started speeding up and I lost track of it because I was still approaching the traffic light at a distance which was about to turn red again.