R1,1 billion fix planned for N1 north

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28-10-2022
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Zoutnet
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The South African National Road Agency Limited (SANRAL) confirmed on Tuesday that it will spend approximately R1,1 billion to upgrade the N1 north between Louis Trichardt and Musina. This was in response to questions regarding the deplorable state of this road, hailed as the Gateway to Africa.

Over the last couple of weeks, the newspaper has been inundated with complaints about the poor state of the road, specifically regarding potholes. One frequent road user, Mr Jaco Lyon from Mopane, actually went out and counted the number of potholes on a 13-kilometre stretch of the N1 between Bokmakierie and the Riverside Nursery the past month. In total, Lyon counted 583 potholes in this section of the road.

Last week, the newspapers curiosity was triggered by a number of environmental-impact-assessment (EIA) notices about fences and farm gates along this section of road. The notice is for the proposed upgrading of the "SANRAL SOC LTD National Road 1 (N1) Section 29, from Masekwaspoort (Km 27.80) to Musina (Km 70), Limpopo Province". According to the notice, the project will entail the general upgrading of the 42.2 km-long road section, including six major intersections, a number of farm accesses, three road bridges and seven major culverts located along the route. The object of the notice is to invite the public to register as interested or affected parties as the project will include upgrades and associated mining activities, seeing that the material for the project will be sourced from seven borrow pits, encompassing an area of up to 125ha located along the road.

Written questions about the proposed upgrade project were sent to SANRAL, and they responded on Tuesday.

Asked when the project was scheduled to commence, Mr Madoda Mthembu (SANRAL Northern Region’s operations and maintenance manager) stated that the tender advert for the construction project would go out in November this year. He added that the exact project value was not yet known at that stage, up until SANRAL had received tender submissions. He did, however, estimate the value at R1,1 billion.

Mthembu referred to the EIA notices along the route. “The construction will remain inside the existing road reserve; the only environmental approvals required are for the borrow pits and for the water-use licence,” he said.

Although the scheduled project is good news for road users in the long run, the question, however, remains what SANRAL is going to do about the present state of the road. Regarding this, Mthembu said that they had a routine road maintenance (RRM) project addressing road failures such as potholes that is outsourced to contractors. “They [the contractors] are supposed to ensure that the road is free of potholes on a daily basis and they have been given a budget to fix failures, of which they had already started with the repairs,” said Mthembu. He added that the contractors had been procured by SANRAL through an open-tender process. Judging by the current state of the road, many road users will feel that these contractors obviously seem to be losing the battle against the potholes.

Asked whether the current state of the road could be contributed to factors such as poor design, increased heavy-vehicle traffic or that the road had just reached the end of it life, Mthembu said that the problem was a combination of the latter. “The road has reached its design life and the increase of heavy vehicles from SADC countries also contributes to failures,” he stated. Regarding the amount of traffic carried on this section of the N1 daily, Mthembu said: “The current projection is that there are over 4 000 vehicles per day, of which heavy vehicles make 32% of that figure.”