I would have jumped.

I’m not particularly partial to the sky-diving trend that seems to be making its way around young adult circles at the moment, but I would definitely have found an air steward’s parachute and jumped had I been on one of the six (reports vary) flights turned away from King Shaka International Airport hours before the semi-final between Spain and Germany.

Hopefully I would have found the right pulley and remembered to avoid bungee-jumpers dangling from the stadium’s overhead Sky-walk as I made my descent into the stadium.

Either that or I would have hijacked the plane using the plastic in-flight breakfast spoon and bottle caps that are hazardous enough to be confiscated at football matches, and parked it on the fan walk.

It turns out these flights were not allowed to land because private planes carrying FIFA VIPs were given preference to land first (various contributory factors have been advanced). The private planes were supposed to drop off their guests before relocating to Durban International Airport, but like that luxury 4x4 that parks across three bays at your local shopping centre, some of them failed to do so. This blocked up the parking/runway space so that the blue collar commercial flights could not land. It’s a pity Paul the psychic octopus didn’t predict all that.

Missing out on the football action can do strange things to a person. I have a friend who accidentally threw away three tickets (each costing over R1000) to the Ghana vs Uruguay game on the same day the garbage collectors came. After making inquiries at several psychiatric homes, we finally found a nice place for him.

With this in mind, one can only wonder how the passengers of those flights must have felt circling the skies of Durban. I suppose one day a tell-all black box will be discovered and the secrets of those dark moments revealed.

Although I didn’t have a ticket for the Durban semi-final, I had contemplated a last-minute road trip from Joburg to the Durban beach fan park. In hindsight it’s just as well I never made the trip – what with all the low-flying planes in the Durban skies periodically cutting across the giant screen …. I would have missed half the action.

Apart from the Durban incident and one or two others, transport has been impressive at this World Cup.

I used the Wits University park and ride for most of the matches I was grateful to attend at Ellis Park.

The first time I went to Wits (early in the tournament), the bus queue started next to the sulphur and iodine stockpiles in the science labs, left campus at the Smit street exit before passing through the southern suburbs, snaking up and down the Top Star drive-in mine dump, and re-entering campus at the Empire road pick-up zone.

Despite its length, the queue moved rather quickly. This was possibly due to the fact that I inadvertently (I promise) jumped part of the queue. Once on the bus, it moved as quickly through Downtown Joburg as a white motorist who had taken the wrong off-ramp from the M1.

The system was not perfect – for instance, buses were not loaded to their capacity, resulting in lengthening queues - but it worked well nonetheless.

The great thing is that improvements would be identified and implemented in the days that followed. As a result, the next time at Wits the queue was shorter and moved without slowing to a stop – probably because traffic was better directed and buses given time to fill with more people before departing.

By my third and fourth visits to Wits, the buses no longer needed drivers as they moved in centrifugal motion around the city, with Wits as its gravitational centre.

Now that’s service delivery.

True, during the early stages Fifa blamed empty seats in certain stadiums on transport problems that saw ticketholders arriving too late to catch the action. However, attendance percentages remained high, and the longer the tournament went on, the only available seats seemed to be in the hospitality suites.

Then there was also the Rea Vaya strike that threatened to disrupt bus transport in the city to the stadiums. However, authorities made a contingency plan for stranded fans, and the local press assisted by quickly spreading the word, firstly, that Joburg has a train besides the Gautrain (the Metrorail), and secondly, that using it would be free if you had a World Cup ticket.

Consequently, when it came time to go to Soccer City, many Joburgers (myself included) chose the Metrorail, revelling in the “sudden” abundance of public transport. Parking was readily available at Park Station and we arrived at the doorstep of the super-impressive Soccer City, with loads of time to spare: one of my friends even penned a short novel about how we managed to find a solitary Chinese woman in the crowd, whose ticket we had seen lying on the floor (a true story that will soon be made into a film).

At a press briefing last week, Dr Danny Jordaan referred to the fact that the essence of apartheid was keeping South Africans separate from each other, and how the transport system had developed around this central principle.

He then proposed that the legacy of the World Cup would be the transport infrastructure it has left behind, and essentially, how this must continue to be used in bringing South Africans together in each others’ traditional backyards.

It is certainly true that while the park and rides will soon be no more, they, together with the long-term transport infrastructure that fortunately does remain, have played a key role in re-introducing South Africans to each other in areas in which they usually wouldn’t meet.

Hopefully, having become acquainted with Soweto and reacquainted with downtown, more people from the likes of the northern suburbs will make more regular visits to such areas, whether to the stadiums for sports events (impending rugby tests will draw the crowds, but hopefully too, will local soccer matches), places like Maponya mall and other local hangouts, until, having become commonplace over time, we no longer speak of the need to do so.

Ke nako.

The time has come - to jump. To jump out of the comfort zones of our better-known and regularly-beaten paths, and into each others’ historically-separate neighborhoods.

It might not be perfect first-time round, but like the park and rides, if we keep trying, it can become so much better.