MOTORING & PUBLIC SAFETY
THE FAST LANE PHILOSOPHERS: AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE REMARKABLE INDIVIDUALS WHO BELIEVE 60KM/H IN THE OVERTAKING LANE IS BOTH LEGAL, REASONABLE and FRANKLY NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS
Every day, on the N2 between Cape Town and Somerset West, a small but extraordinarily committed group of motorists takes up residence in the right-hand lane and stays there. This is their story. Nobody asked for it.
By Derick Badenhorst-Kotze — Motoring, Road Rage & Existential Despair Correspondent
There is a moment, familiar to every driver who has ever pointed a vehicle toward Somerset West on the N2, when hope gives way to resignation. It occurs approximately three seconds after you move into the fast lane to overtake and discover that the vehicle now directly ahead of you — the one that was previously a distant shape on the horizon — is travelling at a speed that your grandfather’s lawnmower could comfortably match on a slight downhill.
The driver is not distressed. The driver is not lost. The driver is not experiencing a mechanical emergency, a medical episode or a navigational crisis. The driver is simply there, in the fast lane, at 60km/h, with the serenity of someone who has made a decision and intends to honour it indefinitely.
You have entered the territory of the Fast Lane Philosopher and you are not getting past anytime soon.
A Brief History of the Problem
The N2 between Cape Town and Somerset West is, by any objective measure, a good road. It is well-maintained by South African standards, reasonably wide, clearly marked and equipped with multiple lanes specifically designed to allow vehicles travelling at different speeds to coexist without incident. The right-hand lane — known in traffic law, in the Highway Code and in the shared understanding of every sentient driver on earth as the overtaking lane — exists for a single purpose: to allow faster-moving vehicles to pass slower ones, after which the faster vehicle returns to the left.
This is not a controversial principle. It is not a matter of interpretation. It is not, as certain N2 motorists appear to believe, a suggestion.
The relevant provision of the South African National Road Traffic Act is unambiguous: the right lane is for overtaking. You use it to pass and then you move left. This is the agreement. This is the contract. This is the foundational social compact upon which the entire enterprise of multi-lane highway driving rests.
The Fast Lane Philosopher has read this contract, considered it carefully and concluded that it does not apply to them.
A Taxonomy of Offenders
In the interest of public education, The Helderburger’s motoring desk has spent considerable time on the N2 — considerably more time than planned, for reasons that will be apparent — cataloguing the principal categories of fast-lane occupants. We present our findings below.
The Oblivious. The purest form. This driver entered the right-hand lane at some point in the recent past and has simply never left, in the same way that a piece of furniture sometimes migrates to a corner of a room and remains there for eleven years because nobody can quite summon the energy to move it. They are not going slowly to make a point. They have no point. They are, in the most technical sense, unaware that they are going slowly at all, because they stopped checking their speedometer approximately when they stopped checking their mirrors, which was shortly after they entered the lane.
To hoot at The Oblivious is to achieve nothing except a vague sense of participation. They will not move. They cannot hear you above the gentle internal monologue they are conducting about whether to have toasted sandwiches or leftovers for dinner.
The Principled Slowcoach. More philosophically interesting. This driver is going slowly in the fast lane and knows it and has decided that 60km/h is, on reflection, the correct speed for a national freeway and that the problem lies not with them but with the reckless society that disagrees. They are not going to move left. The left lane is for people in a hurry and hurrying, in their considered view, is itself the problem. They drive with the quiet moral authority of a person who has given this considerable thought and reached a conclusion that happens to be entirely wrong.
They may glance in the rearview mirror at the queue forming behind them. They will not accelerate. They may, if particularly committed to their position, slow down slightly, having decided that the problem is everybody else’s urgency rather than their own pace.
The Phone-Assisted Navigator. This driver is in the right-hand lane because Google Maps told them something twelve seconds ago and they are still processing it. The phone is mounted on the dashboard. The phone is also in their hand. The phone is possibly being consulted for a second opinion. At some point in the immediate future, they will need to make a decision about the off-ramp and until that decision is made, the right-hand lane is where they intend to remain, as a precautionary measure, the way one might stand near a door at a party in case things become necessary.
They will indicate left at the last possible moment, cross two lanes simultaneously and disappear down the off-ramp leaving behind them a collection of drivers who have aged perceptibly during the preceding four kilometers.
The Chatty Couple. One is driving. One is talking. The one who is talking has recently said something of sufficient interest that the one who is driving has redirected approximately 70% of their cognitive resources toward the conversation and the remaining 30% toward the road. The result is a vehicle travelling at the speed that the conversation is going, which is leisurely, detailed and not going anywhere in a hurry.
The Chatty Couple is, in isolation, entirely charming. In the fast lane of the N2, they are the automotive equivalent of holding a book club in a revolving door.
The Truck That Got Lost. Technically not a car and technically the most understandable of the group, but no less present for it. This vehicle is large, its GPS has delivered it somewhere its driver did not intend and it is now navigating the N2 with the careful dignity of something that knows it is in the wrong place but has not yet identified the right one. It occupies the fast lane not by preference but by geometrical necessity — it has somehow ended up there and cannot immediately get out without a turning radius roughly equivalent to that of the Lourens River in flood.
We do not mock the truck. We merely note its presence and wait, patiently, for physics to resolve the situation.
The Queue
Behind any given Fast Lane Philosopher on the N2, a queue will form. It forms quickly, with the natural inevitability of water finding a low point or a City of Cape Town infrastructure project finding a delay.
The queue has its own internal culture. At the front, immediately behind the Philosopher, is a driver in a state of focused, contained fury — engine revving slightly, grip on the steering wheel fractionally tighter than the situation technically requires, indicators flicking on and off in the universal semaphore of “please move.” This driver has been here longest and has moved through the full cycle of hope, confusion, frustration, acceptance and something approaching spiritual resignation.
Behind them, a second driver who has just joined the queue and does not yet know they have joined a queue. They are still in the phase of thinking that perhaps everyone is braking for a reason, that perhaps there is something ahead, that perhaps this will resolve itself in a moment. It will not resolve itself in a moment.
Further back, a BMW that has spent the last kilometer and a half trying to find a gap in the left lane to overtake the queue from the wrong side, which is both illegal and — in a purely theoretical sense, divorced from all consequence — an understandable expression of the human need to maintain forward momentum in the face of collective institutional inertia.
Somewhere in the middle of the queue, a white bakkie that has now been behind the same blue Corolla for three kilometers and is making peace with its situation, one resigned gear-change at a time.
The Hoot: An Analysis
At some point, someone in the queue will hoot. It is inevitable. The only variables are who and when.
The hoot on the N2 is a complex communicative act, rich in social meaning and almost entirely without practical effect. It says: I am here. I am behind you. I am going somewhere. I would prefer to be going there at a speed greater than the one currently on offer. I am aware that this hoot will change nothing and I am hooting anyway, because the alternative is to simply absorb this experience in silence and I am not, today, equal to that.
The Fast Lane Philosopher receives the hoot and processes it. Some will not react at all, which is honest. Some will glance in the mirror with an expression of mild surprise, as though the queue that has been forming behind them for the past four kilometers is a new and unexpected development. Some — the most committed Philosophers — will respond to the hoot by tapping their own brakes, a gesture that says, in the clearest possible terms, that they are aware of the social contract, have considered it and have decided that the correct response to being pressured is to apply the brakes on a national freeway, which is the kind of decision that The Helderburger’s legal desk has some concerns about.
The Somerset West Effect
There is a particular quality to this experience on the N2 between Cape Town and Somerset West that deserves its own consideration.
The N2 approaching the Helderberg is, in its final kilometers before the Somerset West turnoff, a road of reasonable width and clear visibility, offering the kind of unobstructed straight that, in a properly functioning universe, allows traffic to flow at the legal limit without incident. It is a road that invites forward momentum. It is a road that was designed, at considerable public expense, to move people efficiently from one place to another.
It is also, on any given weekday afternoon, a road containing at least one vehicle in the fast lane travelling at a speed that is better suited to a residential street in a school zone during a light drizzle.
The Somerset West off-ramp approaches. The queue lengthens. Somewhere behind you, someone who left Cape Town twenty minutes ago with an ambitious ETA is revising their plans. Somewhere ahead of you, a Philosopher is indicating left — finally, mercifully, gloriously left — and the lane opens and for a brief, luminous moment the N2 functions as intended and you accelerate past the point of obstruction and continue on your way.
You look across as you pass. The Philosopher is settled in the left lane now, composed and unhurried, already going exactly the speed they were going before. They are not embarrassed. They are not chastened. They are simply moving, at their pace, toward their destination, untroubled by your urgency or anyone else’s.
It is, in its way, admirable.
It is also, in its other way, completely maddening.
The Legal Position
The Helderburger’s legal correspondent, Advocate Petronella van Wyk-Bosman (retired), has asked us to note that hooting unnecessarily is itself a contravention of the Road Traffic Act, that tailgating is a separate and serious offense and that while occupying the right lane without overtaking is indeed illegal, the correct response is patient compliance rather than aggressive pressure.
Advocate van Wyk-Bosman submitted her remarks from the passenger seat of a vehicle that was, at the time of writing, stationary behind a silver Hyundai Tucson in the fast lane of the N2 doing approximately 58km/h and we would note that her tone, while technically accurate, carried a certain controlled intensity that suggested professional objectivity and personal experience were briefly in productive conflict.
A Modest Proposal
The Helderburger does not, as a publication, endorse road rage, illegal overtaking, excessive hooting or any form of aggressive driving behaviour. We are a responsible community newspaper. We believe in calm, considered, law-abiding road use.
We do, however, believe in the following modest proposal, offered in the spirit of community harmony and the forward movement of Helderberg traffic:
If you are in the right-hand lane of the N2 and the vehicle behind you is closer than it would like to be and the vehicle behind that one is also somewhat closer than comfortable and the vehicle behind that one has been there for a while now and you look in your rearview mirror and see what can only be described as a concerned collection of motorists extending some distance toward Cape Town — consider, gently, whether the left lane might serve your current needs equally well.
It is a spacious lane. It is a perfectly good lane. It is, for the speed you are travelling, the correct lane. It offers all the same scenery, all the same road surface and all the same eventual arrival at Somerset West — a destination that will, we promise, still be there when you reach it.
The mountains will still be magnificent. The wine estates will still be open. The property values will still be improbable. The rates bill will still be in the post.
Move left. Let us through. We will be grateful in the wordless, fleeting, deeply sincere way of a driver who has just been liberated from three kilometers of enforced contemplation and we will think warmly of you all the way to the offramp.
It is, truly, the least we can do for each other.
Postscript
This article was written over the course of two evenings. The original draft was significantly longer. It was, however, composed in the passenger seat of a vehicle on the N2 during the afternoon commute and a substantial portion of it was deleted when the writer’s phone battery died somewhere between the Strand turnoff and the Somerset West interchange, during a delay that was, by any fair estimation, entirely avoidable.
The silver Hyundai Tucson was last seen indicating left at the Somerset West offramp, two kilometers after the queue behind it had reached eleven vehicles.
It did not appear to look back.
Derick Badenhorst-Kotze has been driving the N2 between Cape Town and Somerset West for nineteen years. His estimated commute time is thirty-five minutes. His actual commute time varies between thirty-five minutes and an experience that feels geological in its duration. He remains, on balance, optimistic.
The Helderburger supports road safety, patient driving and the radical notion that the right-hand lane is for overtaking. Letters to the editor on this subject are welcome. Please allow extra time for delivery if travelling via the N2.