City of Cape Town Sweet Service and Sour Service Awards!

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The Sweet Service Award goes to the City of Cape Town for the wonderful work it has done to enlarge and soften some of the curves on Camps Bay Drive, which was re-opened on Monday after almost eight months of construction, unfortunately running late by two months. The cost of the upgrade was R30 million. Odd is how Councillor Jacques Weber started crowing about the opening one day before, when he did not utter one word of feedback or sympathy to residents of Camps Bay and Hout Bay, who were severely inconvenienced by the road closures. The highlight is the creation of a new tourist stop on the seaside of the road, to allow photographs to be taken over the beautiful bay. In the past cars had to park on the opposite side of the road, and photographers has to dash across in a dangerous curve, luckily without any consequences. The road upgrade is the first in 30 years, and was long overdue, given the dramatic increase in traffic carried by Camps Bay Drive. What is missing is parking lines in the #parkandpic tourist stop area. Hopefully the construction containers higher up on Camps Bay Drive will be removed soon now that the construction has been completed! Annoying is that signage boards used to guide the traffic lower down on Camps Bay Drive have been removed but the poles planted in residents’ pavement gardens to hold the signs have not!

The Sour Service Award goes to the City of Cape Town for its regular roadblocks to catch Uber drivers it deems to be driving illegally. Lovely Uber driver Wellington told me that they have to hide their cellphones, no longer being able to clip them on to their air conditioning system, as this is the only way that an Uber driver can be identified. Wellington told me that his car was impounded by the traffic department when held up in a road block, for which he had to pay over R9000 to obtain his car back. Often the traffic police wait outside the drop-off zone at Cape Town International, typically the meeting point for Uber clients. Wellington told me that clients have to be asked to cover for the Uber driver should they land up in a road block, as the traffic cops interrogate them! As a regular Uber user I was horrified to hear about this unnecessary policing, when there are far more important traffic issues for the City to deal with!

The WhaleTales Sweet & Sour Service Awards are presented every Friday on the WhaleTales blog. Nominations for the Sweet and Sour Service Awards can be sent to Chris von Ulmenstein at whalecot@iafrica.com. Past winners of the Sweet and Sour Service Awards can be read on the Friday posts of this blog.