The article, R511 Widens to 8 Lanes, week ending 19 February 2016, refers:
It’s all very well to widen the R511 to eight lanes, but what happens to traffic once it meets up with the four lanes of William Nicol [Drive]? A major bottleneck creating even more driver frustration, arrogant law-breaking behaviour, accidents and possible road rage.
To alleviate the above, William Nicol [Drive] would likewise have to be widened to eight lanes all the way through to the N3 intersection, preferably all the way to Sandton and beyond.
Being retired, I seldom have to travel between Fourways and Sandton, but recently l have had to do so a number of times during the early morning rush hour.
What strikes me is the total inadequacy of the various feeder roads leading to the CBD, hence the deplorable behaviour of so many drivers, especially taxi drivers.
If one notices (for instance), along Douglas and Grosvenor [roads] plus Leslie Road, the original city planners provided wide road reserves for future road widening! This same, forward-thinking, planning strategy is to be observed throughout the greater Johannesburg region.
Now, had these arterial routes been widened, as the outlying dormitory suburbs expanded (as understood and planned for by these early city planners), much of the present-day frustrations experienced (on a daily basis) by commuters would be virtually eliminated.
Another observation has been that along some of these arterial routes, developers seem to have either illegally, or by some other nefarious method, built into these road reserves, thereby preventing the intended, future widening of these vital lifelines from the dormitory suburbs to the CBD.
I’m also glad to hear that those two monstrous ‘white-elephants’ in Diepsloot [the bridges under construction] will at last be completed and hopefully used for their intended purpose – as pedestrian bridges.
Unfortunately I fear that, unless both sides of this eight-lane highway are adequately closed off (with palisade barriers to prevent jaywalking), residents will resist using these pedestrian bridges, risking life and limb to cross this high-speed highway and adding to the road death statistics of pedestrian fatalities.
Are traffic and jaywalking the only thing that get you banging the steering wheel? Describe your experiences on the Fourways Review Facebook page
