Why Joburg’s roads are in chaos

Picture the scene: a burst water pipe on a busy suburban road in one of the major metros on a Friday night.

The bad scenario

In one metro, the work crew arrives after a few hours, and a bulldozer begins ripping up the road and pavement while staff struggle to locate the tap to shut the water supply in the area.

Fibre ducting is lifted, and cables are ripped up indiscriminately. If motorists are lucky, a giant yellow plastic barricade is dumped somewhere near the scene to indicate caution. Piles of mud, earth and tar form wherever there is space.

Upon locating the leaky water main, a work crew does the final bit of excavation by hand. Repairs begin. If the region depot has stock of the pipe, clamp or join, the repair should be quick. If not, residents are in for a wait.

Once the repair is done, the crew may or may not backfill the hole. If they don’t (sometimes, there is a legitimate need to check whether the repair will hold), there is a 50-50 chance they’ll return some days later to fill it. It may or may not be re-tarred at some point.

The good scenario

In the other metro, the work crew arrives and begins digging around various other services and ducts that run along the road and pavement. They have accurate wayleave plans and use these as a guide.

A traffic officer is on the scene and places cones to narrow the road to a single lane. They stay on duty to assist with traffic flow.

If a digger is required, it arrives after the careful excavation of other services is done. Because the city has accurate plans of all services, the team has spares. The repair is completed, the hole is filled and compacted.

A second team arrives within days to re-tar the road and the pavement is restored.

A lived experience for millions

These are not made-up scenarios. The first was in Bryanston. The size of the main necessitated Johannesburg Water digging a crater large enough to swallow a minibus taxi. There were no warning signs during or after the excavation.

Rather, two giant piles of mud and tar “cordoned” off the portion of the one lane. Motorists simply had to figure out how to navigate around it. The crater was mostly filled after a week, and that Bryanston thoroughfare will now be a dirt road for the next few months. A few large piles of rubble (mostly paving from a driveway), tar, and sand remain along the pavement.

The second occurred off Kloof Street in Cape Town. By last Monday, the only sign that a water main was repaired was an obvious patch of fresh tar.

How can one city get it so right and the other so wrong?

Municipal workers in Cape Town typically take great care and pride in their work because many are career civil servants. Compare traffic law enforcement by the “uncles” who work for the City of Cape Town with whatever it is Johannesburg Metro Police Department officers do, and the difference is plain to see.

In Joburg, generally, this pride and care is absent. With infrastructure entities, the staff doing the work are contractors where there is a large variance in the quality of work delivered. No-one checks up on them, and shortcuts are standard.

^{A damaged section of road is seen near Northcliff Corner Shopping Centre, Johannesburg, 28 April 2024. Picture: Michel Bega/The Citizen}

The second – and likely foremost – reason for these stark differences is structural.

In Cape Town, the various departments are all part of the same entity. Everyone works for the City of Cape Town. Fault logging is centralised, and work orders are dispatched to the relevant crews. There is accountability and it’s difficult for work teams to take shortcuts.

What’s Joburg’s problem?

The problems affecting the City of Joburg can be traced back to the late 1990s when a decision was taken to demerge the functional infrastructure and service delivery entities into separate companies owned by the city but operated independently.

What followed in the 24 years since is ever-growing chaos: Johannesburg Water can repair a pipe, but the Johannesburg Roads Agency (JRA) needs to reinstate roads and pavements after the work is done.

No accurate system is yet in place to allow the city’s entities to interface with each other and ensure accountability. Even something as simple as fixing a streetlight becomes unnecessarily complex. These fall under the JRA but require a working electricity supply from City Power.

You might now understand why simple repairs take days instead of hours and more complicated ones weeks instead of days. There is no centralised fault logging and tracking system. Tickets are arbitrarily closed and when social media platform X is the most useful way of getting feedback on an issue, you can be sure there’s a massive problem.

The city itself is run via WhatsApp groups.

These entities should’ve been collapsed back into the City of Joburg years ago, but that process will take years and there is no incentive to change any of this.

There are far more efficient ways of managing service delivery across a population of 4.8 million people and 1 650m2 than the current mess. It’s almost a miracle anything works at all …

This article was republished from Moneyweb. Read the original here.