JRA ends traffic signal maintenance and repair partnership with Gauteng – see if your area is affected

The Johannesburg Roads Agency (JRA) will no longer install, repair and maintain traffic signals on behalf of the provincial department in Gauteng.

This was announced by the JRA on Thursday.

The agreement was terminated following a period of protracted negotiations between the JRA and the Gauteng Department of Roads and Transport, the MMC for Transport in City of Johannesburg, Funzi Ngobeni and the MEC for Roads and Transport, Jacob Mamabolo.

“We could not reach agreement to renew a Service Level Agreement (SLA) that would have seen the agency continue to actively maintain and repair 231 signalised intersections on provincial roads across the City of Johannesburg.”

The termination was effective from the 31 March 2022.

The termination of the SLA between the city and the province is likely to create further chaos to an already strained traffic maintenance issue with a number of robots already out of order in several areas.

An SLA was entered into between the JRA and the provincial department, with effect from 1 September 2017 but this agreement expired in August 2020.

Since then, numerous attempts have been made to renew the SLA but these have been unsuccessful.

Ngobeni in a statement said at a meeting held between himself and Mamabolo in March, the MEC indicated that the reason for not renewing the JRA SLA was due to the entity not having its tax affairs in order.

“The tax dispute between JRA and SARS is going through a legal process, with the agency’s legal team having issued a notification to SARS of its intention to refer the matter to Tax Court. In terms of the law, SARS has 45 days, which is until 30 May 2022, to issue a Record of Decision and after that JRA has 20 days to launch the application.”

The JRA said despite ongoing negotiations, it continued to repair and maintain the province’s traffic signals out of concern for motorists frustrated by continuous traffic jams on key intersections across the City, especially during peak hours.

“It is important to note that JRA simply could not leave these intersections unmaintained while motorists, who are none the wiser about whether these were the responsibility of JRA or the provincial government, continued to experience daily frustrations.”

These are the affected provincial traffic signals

The JRA said a process is underway to handover a total of 231 maintained intersections to the Gauteng Department of Roads and Transport.

The JRA added that from the 1^st of April 2022, it began attending only to the 1 992 signalised intersections under its jurisdiction while the provincial department will attend to queries related to its traffic signals.

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