DA proposes dedicated fund for road maintenance

The Democratic Alliance on Thursday proposed a dedicated fund for road maintenance be established.

"The increasing number of dangerous potholes on countless South African roads are not only putting lives at risk and causing damage to vehicles, but are resulting in a number of civil claims against the state following injuries, thus placing a further burden on the public purse," DA spokesman Stuart Farrow said.

The DA believed the answer was twofold.

On the one hand, government should establish a road maintenance fund, and on the other, it needed to re-evaluate how it assigned and allocated infrastructure spend.

This problem, which resonated with every South African who used the roads, was heading towards a tipping point and, unless addressed, would pass that point where the cost of repair became unmanageable.

A myriad of roads in South Africa's major metropolitan areas, especially Durban and Johannesburg, were riddled with potholes.

This was a direct result of government's lax attitude towards effecting repairs to South Africa's road maintenance backlog which currently stood at R38.3 billion, Farrow said.

The backlog had escalated to this huge amount precisely because government had neglected to carry out continuous road repairs before the costs of such repairs escalated exponentially.

Between 1988 and 1999, the percentage of the road network in good or very good condition fell from 75 percent to 33 percent.

The typical cost of maintaining a road, when maintenance was done timeously, was R100,000 a kilometre.

If the road was left for three years, the cost rose to R600,000, and if left for a further five years, to R1.8 million a kilometre.

A bad road also cost motorists twice as much in time, safety and operational costs as a good one.

The Constitution placed a duty on the state to ensure reasonable measures were in place to provide for the safety and security of all South Africans, including those using the country's roads.

"A dedicated fund for road maintenance must be established to ensure a regular supply of funds to gradually eliminate the R38.3 billion backlog," he said.

Funds could be invested from the existing fuel levy, in addition to toll income and other traffic-related income sources, which together currently contribute R26 billion to the fiscus annually.

It could also come from state funding in the form of conditional grants, public-private partnerships, concessions, state-guaranteed money market loans, public works programmes as part of poverty relief and job creation projects, vehicle licence fees and fines and international loans.

The DA would write to Transport Minister Sbu Ndebele calling for the establishment of such a fund to help eradicate the backlog.

"Too many South Africans have lost their lives and means to livelihood due to the ANC-government's apparent lax attitude towards repairing the country's deteriorating road network," Farrow said.

Sapa

Posted at 09:19AM Jan 29, 2010 by Editor in Market  |  Comments[3]