The truth shall set you free

Road maintenance collapse kills people

The Heatonville road leading from and to Empangeni is regarded by local motorists as something best avoided. Their aversion is based on a perception that both buses and taxis, regular users of this artery, drive too fast, too recklessly and often on the wrong side of the road. Heatonville residents allege that buses even use the road as a raceway which, if true, must immediately be stopped. The state of the road, littered as it is with large potholes, adds to the perception of doom. Whatever the reason, yet another fatal accident involving a car with schoolchildren colliding head-on with a bus, has been notched up.

As with most road accidents, no clear-cut cause emerges from this terrible incident, although it does seem abundantly clear that the bus was travelling on the wrong side of the road, possibly due to the driver wishing to avoid potholes or other vehicles standing haphazardly parked where they had no right to be. We trust an inquest will rule on the matter. One of the great transport problems of South Africa is that, with the possible exception of our national throughways which are maintained through tolling private users, our ordinary roads are on the point of collapse. Much of the disrepair is due to a policy shift away from the former national transport system, moving carriers of heavy long distance freight from rail to road traffic, to the immediate detriment of the roads never built to handle such volumes and weights.

Rail collapse
The recent revelation by Transport Minister Sbu Ndebele that railways are far better suited to long distance heavy freight is ironic, given the current reality that most railway sidings scattered across the old rail routes have been carted off, brick by brick, by squatters. In some places, even the rail track has been raised and sold to scrap metal merchants. Harking back to proven transport recipes, as has been tried for instance in national education and the re-establishment of ranks in the SA Police Services, won’t work. News that the Chinese are to build us a prestige new bullet train system, shuttling at delirious speeds between the coast and the interior, doesn’t miraculously solve the freight problem either. Nor will it repair the ailing road system.

A modern, working transport system - incorporating road, rail and air routes - is strategically planned and implemented, based on reliable systems and a responsive, informed and properly documented user public. It must be properly monitored and expertly maintained, none of which is currently happening. Too many innocent South Africans have already been unnecessarily killed because of poor road maintenance. Roads built by the Romans thousands of years ago in Europe and North Africa are still as robust as they were then when they carried heavy carts with steel-clad wooden wheels and trembled under the tramp of the armoured legions. But then, all roads led to Rome.