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F E A T U R E
Gauteng Freeway Improvement Project
www.nra.co.za
www.nra.co.za
Gauteng Freeway Improvement Project The Gauteng Freeway Improvement Project (GFIP) is the single largest road project to be undertaken by the South African government in over 20 years, and was launched by South African National Roads Agency Limited (SANRAL) in 2006 to create a better road and freeway network in Gauteng.
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s the economic heart of South Africa, Gauteng has seen a boom of housing, commercial, and industrial property development over the last ten years. The resulting increase in traffic means that existing infrastructures are now over capacity, and the road and freeway networks no longer sufficient to meet Gauteng's traffic demands. This has consequences — from greater travel times, to increased fuel consumption, to higher vehicle emissions, to a lower level of profitability for developments in the
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province. The Gauteng Freeway Improvement Project (GFIP) was conceived by South African National Roads Agency Limited (SANRAL) in order to provide a solution to these problems. The project is currently underway, and aims to upgrade the infrastructural network in Gauteng and implement new freeways towards an ultimate goal of a 560km network, reducing traffic jams and travel times in the province. Set to inject around 29 billion
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rand into the South African economy, and create around 30,000 direct jobs over the course of the project, GFIP will be contributing to widened economic and social development opportunities in Gauteng. While planning GFIP, SANRAL took several alternative transport methods into consideration, and strived to create links with the Gautrain, Metrorail and Bus Rapid Transport to provide the population with more choice in term of public transport and car-pooling. The aim of this is to alleviate congestion, reduce emissions, and improve motorists' road experience by taking a more streamlined approach to transportation. The roads and freeways affected by the project will also enjoy Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS), including Variable Management Signs (VMS), Incident Management Services (IMS), and CCTV cameras. The VMS provide innovative traffic management services and allow for safer, coordinated transport networks, and have already been installed during the first phase of the project. IMS and CCTV allow SANRAL to optimise road capacity, dispatch emergency services more efficiently, and warn motorists of congestion more effectively. Traffic information is updated live on SANRAL's traffic website, giving road users access to incident alerts, construction updates, traffic speeds, and other travel information. Phase one of GFIP was planned before South Africa received confirmation that their 2010 World Cup soccer bid had been successful, and while the phase was not completed in time for the event, significant effort was made to ensure that most of the road widening and construction work was completed in time to help Gauteng cope with the additional tourism and resulting traffic. 3
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Phase one of GFIP was planned before South Africa received confirmation that their 2010 World Cup soccer bid had been successful, and while the phase was not completed in time for the event, significant effort was made to ensure that most of the road widening and construction work was completed in time to help Gauteng cope with the additional tourism and resulting traffic.
“There are about one million vehicles using Gauteng's freeways every day and we needed to ensure that traffic flowed safely and contractors were not in harm's way,” explained GFIP manager Alex Van Niekerk, speaking to Engineering News. This led to the bulk of the manual work being carried out overnight, when traffic was less dense. The phase was toll-funded, and resulted in 185km of freeway being upgraded or constructed to connect inner and outer ring roads as well as improving access to southern and western Gauteng settlements. Among the 34 interchanges that saw considerable upgrades were the Allendale, Rivonia, William Nicol, Gilloolys and Elands interchanges. Of course, there are large costs associated with such a large project. Through SANRAL, the South African Department of Transport (DoT) will be investing a total of around 55 billion rand into GFIP — 12 billion rand for the first phase, 20 billion rand for the second, and 23 billion and for the third and final phase. Despite this investment, the project still requires funding from e-tolls in order to run. The DoT believes SANRAL were thorough in their investigation of alternative funding options, and is in
accordance with their conclusion that e-tolling was the only realistic way to proceed. Despite this, the e-tolling mechanism used to fund the project has still been the subject of a lot of dispute. Phase two of GFIP, also to be toll-funded, is currently on hold due to this, and contracts will not be awarded until the government has reached a decision on how to proceed with the implementation of the e-tolls. There are concerns that the tolling system has caused suburbs and
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by-roads to be congested by road users attempting to avoid paying, as well as fears that businesses will pass on the additional expenses to customers, pushing up the cost of groceries and causing additional ďŹ nancial struggles for the poor. The burden this could place on other government sectors means that much discussion is required before involved parties can come to a fair compromise.
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