It's all no go in Joburg's traffic light shambles

Many of the most important traffic lights in Johannesburg are on the blink - and the situation does not look as if it will improve any time soon.

Even the metropolitan police department admits that it cannot deal with the chaos of traffic jams at the busy intersections.

What will it do next year, when the situation is expected to exacerbate, especially in the northern parts of the city?

E-tolls are likely to drive people off the highways and construction projects under way in Sandton and Rosebank could lead to even greater traffic congestion.

Experts and city leaders blame the unreliable signals on a number of factors:

• Wet weather;
• Cable theft and vandalism;
• Inadequate repair jobs after motorists crash into signal posts;
• Ageing infrastructure; and
• Challenges in the Johannesburg Roads Agency.

The JRA has 22 technicians to look after 2113 traffic lights from a Traffic Management Centre staffed by four people, who are split into two 12-hour shifts.

Unlike other metros, Johannesburg does not have fully automated signals to alert the centre when there is a problem.

Instead, it relies on tip-offs from motorists.

The agency has a seven-day turnaround time to fix reported damaged or missing traffic lights and a 24-hour one for other faults.

But most of the time they fail to live up to this.

"Accident damages are the major causes of signals [being] out for extended periods ... Repair periods depend on the type of equipment that requires replacement and is normally longer where pole-overs, controller damage or cable faults are the main cause of the outages," said JRA spokesman Sam Modiba.

An engineer said the signals were sensitive to lightning strikes and short-circuited because water seeped into their mechanisms. He said the two types of outages - flashing lights and dead signals - were caused by problems in the system and power outages, respectively.

Nico de Jager, a councillor in the city's oversight committee on transport, said even the council did not know how severe the situation was.

He accused the JRA of not being tough on City Power and Eskom in terms of outages: "We do have service level agreements with theses entities, but there are no penalties."

Broken signals often mean traffic gridlocks, missed meetings and hours of production lost. Economist Mike Schussler was recently quoted speculating that the economic impact of faulty lights could run into the billions.

After a particularly bad experience about three weeks ago, a Johannesburg motorist, Amanda Fairweather, an advertising executive, ranted on social network Twitter.

She tweeted: "I've spent three hours in my car, travelling a total of 31km, thanks to faulty traffic lights. World class African city, Joburg."

She later said in an interview that she was not even driving during the peak hour.

The pointsmen programme, sponsored by a number of businesses such as the insurance company Outsurance, has at times been able to prevent the city's roads from descending into chaos. The programme, which was started more than seven years ago, deploys 120 pointsmen and women every day.

Colleen Bekker, chief executive of Traffic Freeflow, the company running the programme, said it had deployed the teams more than 17000 times between December 2012 and November.

Superintdent Edna Mamonyane of the JMPD, said the city did not have the staff to get a grip on the effects of faulty lights.

"We get rescued by the pointsmen a lot," she said.

Aki Anastasiou of Talk Radio 702, who has covered traffic for more than 20 years, said: "It makes no sense that Tshwane, for example, and the Western Cape do not have the same traffic issues as Johannesburg does."