Traffic cops must spend the first hour of each day inspecting roads for potholes before reclining behind their speed cameras, says transport minister Sbu Ndebele.
Speaking on behalf of the cabinet’s infrastructure development cluster in Cape Town opn Tuesday, Ndebele announced that a R22.3-billion programme – S’Hamba Sonke (Walking Together) – to repair and maintain the country’s dilapidated secondary road system would be implemented from 2011.
It would begin with a ring-fenced R6.4-billion in the current financial year, he said, followed by R7.5-billion in 2012/2013 and R8.2-billion in 2013/2014.
The plan includes a “massive pothole patching programme that will be rolled out nationally with immediate effect” and the establishment of a “pothole hotline” for road users to report the existence of potholes.
Ndebele said roads engineers, road superintendents and even traffic officers would be roped in to physically inspect the condition of secondary roads and report any potholes they found.
“Roads engineers and superintendents will be deployed all over our network with the responsibility to address potholes. They will be charged with driving up and down stretches of road every morning in order to determine the daily condition of our road network. In this way, potholes will be identified and repaired early,” he said.
Pressed for clarity on the matter, Ndebele broadened the pothole patrol to include traffic officers, saying they could not possibly enforce traffic laws “without having seen the condition of these roads” and suggesting they begin their day with a pothole inspection before setting up their speed traps.
And in relation to roads engineers, he said: “What does a regional roads engineer do all day? They must know the roads they are responsible for.”
Ndebele conceded that South Africa had failed to spend appropriately on road maintenance. The international norm is for a 60/40 split between maintenance and construction, whereas the domestic norm had reversed this.
“Historically, as a country, we have invested mainly in the construction of roads without striking a balance between maintenance and construction,” he said.
Decades of neglect have left the country’s roads in a perilous state and potholes alone are estimated to cost road users about R50 billion a year in vehicle damage and injuries. Estimates for the maintenance backlog on South African roads vary between R75 billion and R100 billion, with an annual budget requirement of about R32 billion. Until now the government has spent about R9 billion a year on road maintenance.
And despite assurances on Tuesday from Ndebele that the government employed “many, many” engineers and road works technicians, the South African Institute of Civil Engineers estimated in 2008 that more than one third of the country’s 231 municipalities did not have a single civil engineer or technician. At that time, there were more than 1000 vacancies for civil engineers at local government level. The current vacancy rate is unknown.
CSIR infrastructure specialist Dr Phil Paige-Green earlier confirmed that officials from the public works department had begun attending a crash course in pothole repairs and that similar courses would be rolled out to other areas of the country in due course.
OVERLOADING ON SA ROADS:
The CSIR estimates that overloading caused over R600 million in damage to the country’s roads in 2009/10 alone. During this period, six weighbridges across the country performed spot checks on more than a million vehicles. Of these, 66 000 were found to be overweight and 28 577 drivers were charged for overloading.
QUOTES FROM CSIR POTHOLE GUIDE, DECEMBER 2010”:
“The main technique for reducing pothole formation is timeous preventative maintenance to the appropriate standards. For the foreseeable future, however, this is unlikely to be achieved fully...
“A survey of severely deteriorating primary roads has shown that traffic has moved to the road shoulders – in some cases, the majority of heavy traffic has moved to alternative routes, which may not have been designed to carry such loads. This will result in premature failure of these routes as well.
“The quality of patching is often poor and many patches do not address the fundamental cause of the pothole, which results in the need to return to patches repeatedly for repair.”
ROAD NETWORK STATISTICS:
The proclaimed road network - that for which a sphere of government has been given direct responsibility - is about 532 000km. This includes national (12 000km), provincial (352 000km) and municipal (168 000km) roads. But the entire road network is estimated at about 750 000km, leaving 221 000km of road – about one third of the whole network – largely unproclaimed or inadequately financed. The replacement value of this network is estimated to be R1.047-trillion.