No joints policy shows promise of what is to come in Roodepoort
It is only a matter of time before power outages will no longer play havoc with traffic lights.
The City of Joburg’s interventions to address traffic light downtime is starting to show positive results, although not in Roodepoort.
Mayoral Committee Member, Councillor Nonhlanhla Makhuba, stated recently that power outages remain a major contributor to traffic signal downtime, constituting 50 per cent of the daily faults reported. Therefore, it is no surprise that Wards 97, 126 and 89 are regularly affected by the frequent power outages in these suburbs.
Ward 126 councilor, David Brand, said, “In the past, it was deemed that cable joints were too expensive and the cables to traffic lights were often just joined, taped and buried in the ground. An obvious problem was that once water had worked its way through to the cable, it shorted out.” Another issue in these wards contributing to the outages is cable theft.
However, as Makhuba reports, in the new financial year, R45 million has been allocated for the replacement of damaged cables and R30 million has been allocated for installation of uninterrupted power supply (UPS) units at key intersections. There are about 22 intersections which will be upgraded in Wards 97, 126 and 89.
Hopefully then Roodepoort will start to see the kind of results that have followed the implementation of the City’s ‘No Joints Policy’, which aimed to progressively reduce the high incidence of signal downtime at the most critical high volume intersections during the last financial year. The policy did away with the joining of old cables whenever an electrical fault was reported at a downed traffic light. Instead, these damaged cables would be replaced with new cables.
Since 89 intersections have been re-cabled and are now joint free, there was an 18 per cent reduction in the average number of daily traffic light faults between November 2016 and June 2017.
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