Drastic changes have been proposed by the eThekwini Municipality to manage the movement of goods and people in and out of the city to reduce congestion on roads, which is threatening to overwhelm the metro’s infrastructure.
The changes are detailed in the City’s plan, titled “Comprehensive Integrated Transport Plan 2024–2029”, which aims to promote a co-ordinated approach to transport and traffic management.
The report was published by the City recently and members of the public have been urged to provide comment.
One of the pillars of the plan is the Travel Demand Management (TDM) strategy, which proposes a variety of initiatives to reduce congestion.
TDM seeks to reduce vehicle kilometres travelled while at the same time increasing travel options, to change travel behaviour patterns and reduce the need for travel through the implementation of transportation-efficient land use developments.
Head of the eThekwini Transport Authority (ETA), Thami Manyathi, said the city’s traffic problems are not as bad when compared with other major cities such as Johannesburg and Cape Town, but the municipality needs to act fast to prevent them from getting worse.
“If you look at the M4 in both directions, the traffic is quite heavy at certain times, and if you look at the N3 heading towards Pinetown, the situation is quite heavy. We might not be as bad as other metros, but we cannot let the situation get to that point,” he said.
Citing the developing problem, Manyathi said: “If you’re going from the CBD to the airport to catch a flight at 6pm, you need to be out of the CBD by 3.30pm. This is despite the airport being just 15 minutes way when there is no traffic.”
Manyathi said the central premise of the TDM strategy is to reduce the time that people spend on the road.
“We are looking at initiatives to bring services closer to the people. The emergence of shopping malls has had a negative impact on local economies where convenience shops that service the need of selling those small but essential food items went out of business. People are now having to travel longer distances just to get small items that should be purchased at their convenience stores.
Bringing such services back is part of addressing congestion,” he said.
Manyathi said the City was reviewing international best practices designed to reduce congestion that could be deployed domestically, adding that the City could not continue to build new roads to cater for the growing demand.
He said among the low-hanging fruits it will be building on is car-pooling.
“It is happening but at a low volume because there have been tensions with the taxi industry who accuse those car-pooling of taking their business, but that is a low-hanging fruit – instead of having five cars coming to the city, you now have one car.”
He said another strategy that has been implemented elsewhere in the world is charging people for travelling at certain times.
“We know that our congestion period is between 8 and 9 in the morning. If we were to say people must pay to be on that road at certain times, people would then have to decide whether they could travel earlier or later,” he said.
They would also need to work with the Department of Education to create a more flexible starting time for schools.
“We would, for instance, say that school starts when work starts and schools could be opened in a staggered manner.”
The report details other international best practices for dealing with congestion that the City could draw from. One of these is flexitime, where employees are allowed some flexibility in their work schedules. Core working hours are maintained, but start and end times differ.
Staggered shifts mean that shifts are staggered to reduce the number of employees arriving and leaving a work site at one time.
The report warned of a need for more reliable and efficient transport, saying the existing transport system in the city faced numerous problems. It said the current public transport system moved about half the travellers in the peak period, but is characterised by poor levels of service, unreliability and a poor safety record, is unsustainable and incapable of attracting passengers, apart from those who are economically captive to this mode of transport.
Dr Malcolm Mitchell, a transport expert, said the measures suggested are standard practice worldwide to manage heavy traffic flows in metropolitan areas.
“However, the issue which arises is whether the city authorities have the determination to properly manage the system. Some years ago, the city installed a high-vehicle occupancy lane on the western freeway, but they were poor at the implementation of it and particularly Kombi taxis completely disregarded the rules of the road, so the system fell into disuse.
“Another problem is that the municipality doesn’t have the internal capability of managing the proposals because of a lack of registered professional traffic engineers. If these hurdles could be overcome, the proposals have the capacity to transform the congestion in traffic in the City,” he said.
The Mercury