Johannesburg Roads Agency lacks Systems and Expertise:
It is the primary function of the Johannesburg Roads Agency (JRA) to ensure a safe reliable movement of the economy, to ensure a road infrastructure and traffic signaling system that meets the agreed Key Performance Indicators (KPI).
The JRA has failed spectacularly in their mandate to ensure that traffic signaling meets the required targets. When driving around the city one has to question the efficacy of the KPI's as they are reported to the Oversight Committee on Transportation where it all looks well, but one only has to drive around the city on any given day to encounter a World Class Fiasco in terms of traffic which can largely be attributed to inefficient systems, ageing infrastructure (including cabling), lack of qualified technicians and a lack of service level agreements between other city entities (City Power) and parastatals such as Telkom and Eskom.
Many of the failures are the lack of political will and financial maladministration of the JRA over the past eight years.
The JRA has a strategy to implement Remote Monitoring over the next two financial years. Remote Monitoring will alert a central point of any malfunctioning traffic signal anywhere in the city and has been successfully implemented elsewhere in the country. The Remote Monitoring system will bring online 1575/2100 traffic signals by 2015, the Democratic Alliance have been calling for this intervention since 2008.
As much as one has one applauds the JRA's new turnaround strategy much of this could have been avoided if the JRA had paid attention to its ailing infrastructure. There has been an absolute lack of political will on the part of the mayoral committee to allocated sufficient budget to the JRA over the past 10 years. Road conditions have deteriorated due to a lack of maintenance and systems over the past 5 years. A recently completed Visual Condition Assessment (VCA) shown that Johannesburg Roads has deteriorated by 25% over the past 5 years since the last assessment in 2008.
The Democratic Alliance is calling on the mayoral committee to urgently intervene and ensure that the process of remote monitoring gets implemented without any delays to ensure a safe reliable system is in place ahead of the implementation of the e- toll system where we will see a further increase of municipal road usage.
Statement issued by Councillor Nico de Jager: DA Shadow MMC for Transport, City of Johannesburg, November 21 2013
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