I-Pledge

The life of a journo involves attending many functions, where companies try to impress members of the media into giving their product/service/establishment/initiative a little bit of ‘free’ exposure in their respective publications. I say ‘free’ because they do pay for it, in a roundabout fashion – hiring venues and caterers, and occasionally lavishing guests with gifts all cost money.

And this time of year, the invitations come in thick and fast. This week alone, I have three invites. Next week, another two. And in-between, a trip to the KZN Midlands.

My first function this week took place in Sandton (evil) at 9am (doubly evil). It took two hours of rush hour traffic through Randburg and Sandton to reach my destination. But that’s a story for another post.

Imperial (the car people) launched its I-Pledge initiative to the public, after successfully developing it in-house with its employees. Basically, Imperial wants to make South Africa’s roads safer, starting with individual drivers. You take a pledge to give up one (or many) bad driving habits, like talking on your cell phone, SMSing, tail gating and road rage. It maintains that if everyone was a little more courteous to drivers and pedestrians (and I assume cyclists, although they weren’t specifically mentioned) we could reduce the number of deaths caused by traffic accidents. I happen to think it’s a wonderful idea and can make a real difference, if people buy into the concept.

I started thinking about what I could change to qualify to take the pledge. My driving habits include:

·         Occasionally driving over the speed limit. I don’t have spare cash lying around to line the pockets of some traffic official, and I usually leave enough time to travel to my destination, so there’s not really any need to speed.

·         Occasionally driving through an orange robot. Because I drive at the speed limit, I am usually able to brake at an orange robot without causing a pile up or burning rubber off my tires. Also, I stop at orange robots because the cars behind tend to shoot through red robots if no one stops in front of them – and the irritates the bananas out of me.

·         Swearing at other drivers, pedestrians and cyclists for doing stupid things and/or getting in my way. I pay my taxes and have as much right to use the roads as they do. This is my Road Rage coping mechanism. It's not hurting anyone and I'm not going to stop.

·         Occasionally talking/SMSing on my phone. Honestly though, I don’t do this often. But I suppose I could try harder to cut this out.

·         Never weaving in and out of lanes – this is one of the behaviours that induce swearing and the occasional zap sign from me. I plan my journey and pick my lane according to the direction in which I need to turn. I don’t decide on a whim to change lanes because the other one is moving faster at the moment. And then push my way back into the previous lane, one car ahead of where I was.

·         Making an effort to travel outside of rush hour so that I don’t get a chance to morph in to Road Rage Jane too often.

So, here’s my pledge:

I-Pledge to continue driving like a responsible person.

If you'd like to take the pledge, visit http://www.ipledge.co.za/