Further to last week's column and the rumour of spring, word has reached us here at the Mahogany Ridge of fevered and urgent stirrings in the trousers of Newlands, which, according to a dating service that caters for such tastes, is allegedly Cape Town's most adulterous suburb.

The usual pinches of salt were taken upon hearing this, followed, quite naturally, by the cactus juice and the slices of lemon; as the ancient mariner in the corner will tell you, merely signing up with such a service, and handing over credit card details in the process, doesn't automatically guarantee that one gets to heave to with a stiff breeze in the offing with someone other than the regular cabin boy.

But that's wishful thinking for you, something the transport MEC Robin Carlisle perhaps knows all about. The recently announced Western Cape Provincial Road Traffic Bill gives an idea of his heart's desires, but whether it all happens for Carlisle is another matter altogether.

This of course did not stop a great number of white men throwing frothies at the proposal to reduce speed limits across the province by10 kilometres an hour, and there was a great rush to tell the nearest radio talk show programme that their very expensive, high-performance motor cars were not designed to drive at such slow speeds and that optimum fuel efficiency was only attained northwards of 140km an hour.

Shame, such flash-looking cars, built for the autobahn and the freeway. It's just a pity that Cape Town is so Dingly Dell and its roads were designed for small ponies and wheelbarrows a century or so before the invention of the pneumatic tyre. 

Quite why this wasn't borne in mind when hocking the house and the family jewels to put down the deposit on the Hubris GTX remains a mystery. But if it wasn't for Woolworths and its allegedly racist employment policies to distract them, they'd probably still be complaining about not being able to enjoy their cars the way they were meant to be enjoyed. The thing about break-need speed, of course, is that it's usually someone else's neck. 

The only vehicles that do get to whizz around the city at that clip, particularly during rush hour, are those in the blue light convoys. As Carlisle put it, "Blue light convoys of dubious purpose have been repeatedly involved in road trauma incidents throughout the country, and this will no longer be tolerated." 

Accordingly, he wants them outlawed except "in the case of a confirmed threat to the life of the VIP" such as a slow-moving motorist in the passing lane or a rude gesture from a bored jogger.

Which brings us to the bicycle menace. In this regard, Carlisle's draft proposals indicate a desperation verging on mania, a panic even, in wanting to rid our roads of this profligate bunch, possibly the single greatest danger to a motorist's peace of mind.

The thing about the cyclists, as Carlisle has acknowledged, is that they have been encouraged to take over the place. Capetonians, who have a soft spot for animals, including the ugly ones, have been known to feed them. 

As a result of this "kindness", cyclists now no longer forage in their natural habitat but brazenly leave home in strange outfits and gather in large troops outside the village superette on weekends, apparently expecting "rewards" from passersby.

Carlisle's suggestion that motorists stay away from them is a start, I suppose, but will the introduction of a 1.5 metre passing law be enough? What's to stop cyclists, wild and unmanageable brutes that they are, riding three abreast, from violating this space?

Perhaps the province could borrow a couple of ideas from CapeNature and their baboon policies and introduce a more aggressive management programme. 

I'm not suggesting that we start culling cyclists willy-nilly, or even taking out their alpha males. We wouldn't want to create that sort of havoc among the troops of cyclists and, besides, with all the alpha-type behaviour involved in dressing up in lycra and startrooper helmets, identification and target selection of troop leaders would be problematic enough as it is.

Don't forget, of course, there are legions of cycle-huggers out there, ordinary folk who consider shooting them with paintball guns way too extreme. They're bound to be upset by such drastic measures. 

But what about sterilising them? Or better still, dart them and put them on a long-term contraceptive. This is one way of bringing the cyclist population down to a more manageable level and it has the added advantage of not interfering when the urge to get all Newlands on one another gets out of hand. 

This article first appeared in the Weekend Argus

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