THE MERCURY
A broken robot in Seadoone Road, Amanzimtoti, was knocked over a month ago, and has yet to be repaired. Picture: Zanele Zulu
Durban – If you have a broken traffic light in your area and wonder why it has not been fixed, wonder no more. The eThekwini Municipality does not have poles or cables to fix broken robots.
The deputy head of the road system management for Durban, Carlos Esteves, confirmed this week that his department had not had stock of the poles and cables for the past six weeks.
This was after the awarding of the contract to Steelcom Engineering to supply the parts was disputed by a losing bidder, Quadrant.
“We have asked for emergency stock to be purchased for critical intersections,” said Esteves.
The city said on Tuesday, after receiving questions from The Mercury about the broken traffic lights, that it had placed an urgent order for 100 poles which would be “processed and delivered ASAP”.
The catalyst for this was when DA councillor for Amanzimtoti Andre Beetge asked that a robot knocked over in his ward be repaired.
Beetge said he waited almost a month, but the light was not fixed, so he approached the city and was told of the situation.
“Municipal employees sit idle without material to do their work… and have allowed motorists to become sitting ducks. EThekwini could be faced with a long-term problem here,” said Beetge.
He said he was told that 30 robots needed to be replaced.
Municipal spokesman Thabo Mofokeng said the contested contract was the subject of an appeal process which the city would have to investigate before deciding how to proceed.
Beetge said an intersection in Winklespruit also had a damaged control box and its six robots were no longer working, and two robots in Pinetown were now overgrown by grass because they had been lying broken for so long.
Beetge said a Section 36 (emergency purchase) contract should be used to remedy the problem.
Mofokeng said the order for the poles fell below the contract quotation threshold of R200 000 and would be procured to meet the “urgent demand”.
Esteves said the damaged control units were custom-programmed for each intersection and took time to replace, but this was also being affected by a shortage of cabling.
The Mercury inspected the broken robots in the Amanzimtoti and Winklespruit areas and, en route to the Durban CDB, found another six traffic lights out of order or knocked over.
Two traffic lights at intersections within metres of each other on the Bluff were bent and wrapped in red and white emergency tape. These were in Solomon Mahlangu (Edwin Swales) Drive and Flower Road.
Further down the busy route, outside the Southway Mall, a robot was knocked over and windscreen glass was strewn on the ground.
A few hundred metres away, at the Hillary Road intersection, another robot was bent over and out of order.
Metro police spokesman Eugene Msomi said there were more than the usual number of traffic lights down, and the metro police had been sent to direct traffic. He said they strived to send officers to problem areas as quickly as possible, but it depended on when they received the message that the robot was down.
A Winklespruit resident, who uses the intersection with non-functioning traffic lights along the R603, Sheldon Higgo, said the robots had been out for three weeks.
Higgo said the traffic backed up to the off-ramp of the nearby N2, and it took him 10 minutes to navigate the backlog and the errant motorists and taxis cutting in.
kevin.lancaster@inl.co.za
The Mercury
