After Durban’s recent heavy flooding many roads in the city collapsed or were so badly damaged they cannot be repaired – and experts say it may only be a matter of time before South Africa’s entire road network collapses, Paul Kirk reports
The backlog in repairing South Africa’s roads exceeds R53-billion and much of it emanates from the 1970s, when then state president PW Botha redirected the road maintenance budget to fighting the “total onslaught”.
In the democratic South Africa, new roads are being built to open up the rural areas of the country, but very little is being spent on maintenance.
“In an ideal world a road should be resurfaced every eight years or so. But we have some roads that have not been resurfaced for more than 20 years. And this is a recipe for disaster,” said Jenny Gray, deputy director general of the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Transport.
Gray is at pains to explain that the black surface of a road is only a waterproof layer – put on to protect the pavement underneath from water.
“When cracks appear in the road we can fill them, but after a while the cracks start to appear more and more frequently and eventually the pavement layer underneath is damaged to the extent that the road has to be scrapped,” she says.
“To resurface a road costs an enormous amount – less than what it costs to build a new one, but more than just filling in the cracks, which is the most short- sighted approach. If the resurfacing is not done then the road will eventually deteriorate to the extent that it will become unsafe and have to be rebuilt.”
In KwaZulu-Natal a number of roads have deteriorated to such an extent that they may soon have to be closed. At least one formerly busy stretch of tar – the road from Winterton to Ladysmith – is now closed to all traffic except residents and no money is available to repair it.
And it is not only in KwaZulu-Natal that roads are falling apart.
A report tabled at a meeting of the Cape Metropolitan Council Transportation and Traffic Committee in Cape Town earlier this year described eight major roads in the metropolitan area as “unsafe”, and in one particular instance as “dangerous”.
Included in the report was a warning that public protection demanded that severe restrictions on speed and carrying capacity would have to be imposed. However, in some cases this would not be enough and authorities would have to con