The Joburg Roads Agency (JRA) outlined strategies to improve the city’s roads through its Resurfacing Programme, and Rehabilitation and Reconstruction Programme with a respective budget of R190 million and R80 million for the current financial year.
According to the roads agency, a Visual Condition Index conducted last year revealed that 27 percent of Joburg’s 13 428kms of road network had deteriorated to poor and very poor condition.
“The deterioration is often reflected in road failures such as potholes, cracks and depressions, and the JRA has introduced a structured approach to road management that prioritises the preservation of existing infrastructure,” said the roads agency’s managing director Skhumbuzo Macozoma
“The first area is about preserving roads in a good condition to make sure that they don’t deteriorate to bad… our focus is on good and fair roads, maintaining and improving their quality to very good at any given time,” Macozoma said.
This resurfacing approach was cheaper for the roads agency and allowed it to restore roads to a very good condition easily, he explained.
The Resurfacing Programme commenced last year with a total expenditure of R140 million, and roads in parts of the city including Rosebank CBD and Midrand had already been resurfaced, he said.
The programme was ongoing and would continue over the next three years.
Macozoma said the agency’s second focus was to reinvest in poor roads, which were roads that would not benefit from the resurfacing programme.
“Those are the roads that are literally gone; that’s where a lot of the potholes are happening. We keep patching them and they keep coming back and that’s because the underlying layers have been damaged.”
According to Macozoma, no amount of resurfacing would effectively deal with the condition of these roads and therefore the Rehabilitation and Reconstruction Programme was being launched to address such roads.
“We need to dig up those roads, we need to fix up the layers underneath so that you have a better quality road going forward.”
According to Mpho Kau, the roads agency’s head of infrastructure development, over the next three years 3 209kms of road required resurfacing and
2 222kms of road would need rehabilitation or reconstruction.
He explained that rehabilitation would see repairs to the underlying road pavement layers, while reconstruction replaced part of or all of the road layers.
Kau said roads that played a crucial role in social and economic activities would be prioritised for resurfacing, rehabilitation and reconstruction.
Further programmes included the restoration of the integrity of the city’s bridges and a storm water management programme, which would address underground infrastructure to eliminate the risk of flash floods.
Macozoma conceded that in some parts of the city there had been glaring shortcomings in terms of the roads agency’s service delivery, which the entity sought to address by improving capacity, including procuring qualified engineers and suitable equipment.
