The broken traffic lights that have been causing major disruptions for motorists across the Nelson Mandela Bay Metro may soon be a thing of the past.
The Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality has explored putting measures in place to curb the vandalism of signal boxes and cables and are looking to implement these measures before the end of the month.
MMC for Roads and Transport, Kabelo Mogatosi, said that they are currently in the final stages of the designs in collaboration with The South African National Roads Agency Limited (SANRAL).
He indicated that detailed measures cannot currently be divulged but ensured that it is a collaborative effort and as soon as the plan that is in the finalisation stages has been finalised within the next week, all details will be supplied.
“We have already started in Stanford Road and so far, the traffic lights have survived longer than they had in the past.
The meeting with SANRAL is beyond the R75 (Uitenhage Road) and it includes other roads which fall under their mandate.
Some roads and junctions will be turned into four-way stops, both municipal and provincial roads, as per traffic flow assessments,” Mogatosi said.
“The M19 (Swartkops) robots will be fixed. We are just working on the security measure with Perseverance Business Cluster. The cost associated with that corner is R500 000 but we are confident that once the measure has been put in place, we won’t have to fix for a while.
“If we do, we will have culprits apprehended. This excludes the security aspect.”
During an oversight visit to the R75 by DA delegates, joined by PE Expressin May this year, DA spokesperson for safety and security in the metro, Gustav Rautenbach, made the observation that more than 20 traffic lights are out of order across the metro.
Multiple traffic-light poles have been lying next to the road, clearly carefully dug up and then vandalised with huge stones.
There have also been several holes and open manholes where the copper cables were disconnected and stolen.
This has been the case since approximately three months into the national lockdown, which was implemented in March 2020, meaning that it has been a problem for almost three years.
Mogatosi said that the cost of fixing one intersection of traffic lights ranges between R130 000 and R500 000, depending on the extent of the problem.
“Challenges range from knocked down traffic lights to vandalism. The knocked down traffic lights are currently being attended to within 24 hours and in some cases 36 hours if there are many knocked down over the weekend, which is when we have issues,” he added.
He mentioned that along the main routes, which are Stanford Road and the M17, the problems are vandalism of signals boards and copper theft.
“The signal boards are of no black market value because they are just communication boards that can’t be salvaged for secondhand use or any other purpose.
“The traffic lights and street lights were fixed more than thrice at an estimated cost of more than R1 million.
When asked about the dangers of deploying traffic officers to intersections daily after the recent murder of Officer Sonica Smith while she was performing duties on the R75, Mogatosi answered:
“It is not ideal for us to continuously have officers along these busy junctions but for now, we have asked the traffic department to help us until we implement.”
