An estimated half or more of the country’s kilometres of roads, and as much as two-thirds of roads in KwaZulu-Natal, have disappeared, largely due to ineffective administration, said a roads expert on Thursday.
”We desperately need a national inventory, using global information systems and satellite tracking,” said Don Ross, a University of Cape Town economics professor specialising in roads.
While the roads have not physically disappeared, they do not show up on official records.
Ross said before 1994 there was a plethora of road authorities that had responsibility for special road classes offered, with municipal roads for example classified as ”urban” roads.
Since the advent of democracy all roads not administered by the South African National Roads Agency Limited (Sanral) became provincial responsibilities, although municipalities participate in aspects such as planning, funding and maintenance and are de facto in charge of urban roads.
However, in devolving the responsibilities of the old administrative structures, many roads slipped through the cracks.
Ross said another critical need for a developing country such as South Africa is to develop a proper classification system for roads in the country.
He said currently there is no accepted national protocol for roads classification, with for example national highways, arterial roads and ”little tracks that service homes” not classified uniformly in different provinces.
Ross said the classification system will go a long way in determining a national roads’ budget and help direct who pays for roads in rural and other areas.
Ross said with a presidential emphasis on infrastructure and roads, this classification system could help negate the rising costs of infrastructural repairs to roads in the country.
”We need to coordinate the national department of transport and the various provincials departments,” said Ross.
According to the latest independent figures, comparisons of the declared provincial road network in KwaZulu-Natal show there is just more than 27 000km of road the provincial government knows it is required to maintain.
”But most engineers, even within the provincial government, would agree that there is another 40 000km of road that has not been declared as part of the provincial network, or legally assigned to the new wall-to-wall municipality system,” said Pierre Cronje, an independent civil engineering consultant who specialises in strategic planning and policy development.
According to Cronje, in one of the Department of Transport’s most recent documents — called the Roads Infrastructure Strategic Framework for South Africa — the uncharted roads are acknowledged to be in the order of about 220 000km in the whole country.
Available information indicates that the lowest category may include many small roads, such as the last route that gives access to some individual properties, but the ”orphans” are by no means just cattle tracks.
For example, major arteries in the tribal lands north of Pietermaritzburg, where more than a million people reside, serve permanent houses and businesses, and are well enough constructed by grader operators to be drivable in a sedan car after a rainstorm.
However, they don’t appear on the official log, said Cronje. — Sapa