Joburg’s potholes, traffic lights and stolen cables: JRA responds

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JEREMY MAGGS: Now, to many of us, to the naked eye, Johannesburg’s road infrastructure would appear to be crumbling. Potholes, congestion, failing traffic lights have all become part of daily life for residents and businesses. Freight operators are particularly hard hit with damaged roads increasing costs and causing major delay in the country’s biggest economic hub.

The Johannesburg Roads Agency [JRA] is responsible for fixing this mess. But the question is, is it delivering or is it simply making excuses while the city’s road network deteriorates further? Well, hopefully some answers now from Sipho Nhlapo, who’s the acting head of department of mobility and freight at the JRA.

Mr Nhlapo, welcome and thank you very much for joining me. You are well aware that businesses are losing millions due to damaged vehicles and delays. What do you say to those people who feel abandoned by the city?

SIPHO NHLAPO: Okay, thanks, Jeremy. I think they’re not abandoned by the city. They’re not abandoned by any agency of the city, but the city in itself operates within an environment of a society. For an example, I’ll make an example with traffic lights. If we put a traffic light on the ground that is working, that is perfectly working. However, we are confronted with a situation whereby some people, and some of them are probably in the businesses, are in the industry itself, they steal the cable that was intended to make sure that the network operates fully to benefit every citizen of the city. It’s a challenge that we’re working with.

Secondly, you’ll realise even with these circumstances that we have, there are a lot of things that the city has been doing, but especially the JRA in terms of the roads. If you look at the M1, the M2, Joe Slovo Drive, we’ve been resurfacing those and some of these results, how do we know that they’re yielding certain positive results, Jeremy, is that when you look at the current TomTom and Inrix traffic congestion studies that they do across the year, across more than 500 cities across the world, you’ll quickly realise that Johannesburg does not even crack the top 10 of the worst traffic or congested cities across the world.

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Even in Africa, even in South Africa, we are not even anywhere near the highest number. It simply means that certain things are working. If somebody was then operating as a freight company, they’ll know very well that when they hit Johannesburg roads, the chances are high that they’ll navigate that city quicker than many other cities in South Africa. You can check that TomTom or Inrix [in your own time].

JEREMY MAGGS: Alright, Mr Nhlapo, you’ve raised a number of issues. Let me pick you up on a few. First of all, let’s talk about the traffic lights and the stolen cables. Are you suggesting to me that the city, that the JRA is powerless to act, that we’ve just got to live with the problem because the cables will always be stolen?

SIPHO NHLAPO: Never. That should never even be a point. I’ve seen other cities go and try to put a stop sign. I’ve heard many people saying, why don’t you just make that traffic light theft-proof. My point first is let’s allow the society or the people not to steal the traffic light because if you put that traffic light there and then we maintain it the way we should be maintaining it, it can [operate] very nicely [for] 30 years on the ground without any problem.

So we need to deal firstly with those societal issues… Over the years we’ve been re-cabling, a lot of our traffic lights. We’ve done very well there. What we’ve done when we re-cable our traffic lights, Jeremy, we have reduced the content of copper in those traffic lights so that even if somebody were to steal it, the yield is very little.

So that is an initiative that we’ve been doing for years. We still need to do more. We’re operating about 2000 sites that are all cabled. That’s what we’ve done. Secondly, what we’ve done, we have tested some of the cable that is called, it’s copper-aluminium combined cable. So a bigger part of is aluminium, which is really worthless. So it does not give you any value in the market. If you start burning that cable, immediately that copper that you’ve stolen loses its quality. So we’re trying some of these things, Jeremy.

Read: Why Joburg’s roads, pavements look like a war zone (and CT’s don’t)

JEREMY MAGGS: Let me move on to the resurfacing. Again, I acknowledge that you are doing work, but the complaint is that potholes keep reappearing despite the repairs. The suggestion is that you’re either using substandard materials or this is just poor accountability.

SIPHO NHLAPO: No, no, that can’t be. We have a world-class asphalt plant in the JRA. We are going through the testing, actually we have already been given certain approvals in terms of testing the quality of the asphalt that we produce. So it can never be a substandard material.

However, what is the challenge? Potholes are a symptom of roads that are crumbling because over the years, for many years, there hasn’t been a lot being done and then in trying to fix a pothole, we are not resolving a bigger problem.

That’s why then the JRA is going through a resurfacing programme. But let’s face it, a city, like many other cities across the country, they don’t have all the money to resurface all the road at a certain time…

You go in some of our communities, people are using car washes and the water flows into the road. You go to some of our suburbs, people are [emptying] their swimming pools out onto the roads. All these elements affect the quality of the road and as the JRA, we will continue doing the work.

But yes, we’ll need more money, we’ll need more resources to do this. But we are trying because we’ll have to admit that there’s not all the money that we require in the JRA. If you see in the past four, five years, our budget has been cut through the year going forward because I guess the city is not collecting enough.

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JEREMY MAGGS: So if the budgets are going to keep being cut and you don’t have money, the reality is that the current situation, the status quo, will prevail and that the problem will only get worse and there will be less maintenance.

SIPHO NHLAPO: That’s the possibility. However, if we keep on resurfacing at the rate we are doing, at least we’ll be covering more roads and then less roads will actually be damaged going forward. So we need to look at it that way.

Then yes, we are always hoping that there can be more funding that comes through our way so that we can do that. But how are we going to counter that? Our asphalt plant is [growing] to a point whereby we will be selling the asphalt to the external contractors. In that way we’ll then be raising some revenue, Jeremy, that will then assist us to be able to do more for the city.

JEREMY MAGGS: Thank you very much indeed. That is Sipho Nhlapo, acting head of department of mobility and freight at the JRA.

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