City of Joburg’s interventions to address traffic light downtime is starting to show positive results.
This was announced by CoJ member of the mayoral committee for Transport, Clr Nonhlanhla Makhuba.
Makhuba said this improvement follows the implementation of the city’s No Joints Policy earlier this year.
The policy served to reduce the high incidence of signal downtime at the most critical high volume intersections in the city.
“The policy did way with the joining of old cables whenever an electrical fault was reported at a downed traffic light. Instead, these damaged cables would be replaced with new cables,” Makhuba said.
During the 2016/17 financial year which ended in June, 89 intersections were re-cabled and are now joint free.
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“There was an 18 per cent reduction in the average number of daily traffic light faults between November 2016 and June 2017 and a 60 per cent improvement in the average time taken to repair faults, excluding faults caused by power outages.
“This has resulted in a 55 per cent reduction in the average traffic light downtime per day.”
Power outages remain a major contributor to traffic signal downtime, constituting 50 per cent of the daily faults reported.
“Increased interaction between Joburg Roads Agency (JRA), City Power and Eskom is being prioritised to address this issue. Similarly to the JRA, City Power and Eskom are also affected by problems of ageing infrastructure and cable theft, which result in power outages,” Makhuba said.
In March 2017, the city allocated an additional R6-m to JRA through the mid-year adjustment process to enable the accelerated implementation of the No Joint Policy.
This allocation was also used to improve the JRA’s traffic light fault detection systems, to improve signal timings to reduce congestion and for security surveillance of critical intersections that are prone to theft of infrastructure such as cables.
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Additional funding was also provided for hiring personnel, and the JRA started a process of recruiting additional traffic light repair technicians.
In the new financial year, R45-m has been allocated for the replacement of damaged cables and R30-m has been allocated for installation of uninterrupted power supply (UPS) units at key intersections.
With the additional funding for UPS units, the JRA will be able to install UPS units at 230 high traffic volume intersections per annum.
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