Authorities in Gauteng are bracing themselves for the return of holidaymakers to the country's economic hub and especially those who were on holiday in hotspot areas. Picture: iStock
While beaches in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) will be closed on key dates this festive season, traffic volumes to the province have not decreased as yet.
On Monday, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced stricter lockdown regulations amid the Covid-19 second wave.
Among them were that beaches in KZN would be closed on 25, 26, and 31 December, as well as on 1,2, and 4 January.
However, the N3 Toll Concession’s operations manager, Thania Dhoogra, said so far the traffic volumes they had registered were on a par with previous years.
“We are getting some notifications from our system, which sends them when certain traffic volumes are hit,” said Dhoogra on Tuesday morning.
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“We’ve had a fairly busy day today – there has been a fairly consistent increase in traffic.”
According to Dhoogra, they anticipated traffic levels to the KZN coast to pick up substantially on the 16 December public holiday and towards the weekend.
“We will see our biggest increase next week on Thursday, Christmas Eve,” she said.
According to Dhoogra, it might still be too soon to tell whether the president’s announcement of beach closures would have an impact on holidaymakers’ plans “but people might already be committed and very few people might be prepared to change their plans”.
For now, she said, “traffic volumes are ticking along and are competitive to what we’ve seen last year”.
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