Letter: Vaalwater: Tourist town or truck stop?
This conveyor belt of trucks is ruining our roads and making our tourist towns unfriendly to visitors.
Dr. Syd Catton, Waterberg Tourism Organisation, writes;
Waterberg Tourism did a survey the past week regarding mining and heavy truck vehicles traveling on the roads through Vaalwater.
From 06:00 to 18:00 our representatives recorded 254 trucks in total that passed them by.
This is an average of over 21 trucks per hour or one every three minutes that drive through the town.
This conveyor belt of trucks is ruining our roads and making our tourist towns unfriendly to visitors.
These trucking routes are, in our opinion, unnecessary because the route from Lusaka to Durban via Vaalwater, Modimolle, and Bela-Bela covers a total distance of 2 297 km. It takes roughly 28 hours for these trucks to drive from A to B, according to Google.
Lusaka to Durban via the A5, N1, and then N3 national roads is 2 156 km and takes 27 hours. Thus, the trucks don’t have to drive through all the Waterberg tourist towns. It would be in total the shorter distance by 141 km and less time spent on the roads.
Both Bela-Bela and the Modimolle local municipalities market themselves as tourist towns and that tourism is their primary growth facilitator.
If this is the case, then why tolerate massive mining trucks rolling through our towns every three minutes and continue to ruin our already dilapidated roads full of potholes and dangerous road surfaces?
Surely the time has come to challenge this unnecessary and unwarranted intrusion on our residents and our tourists.
