Most people don’t appreciate roads until they’re stuck in traffic and notice things like decent lane width, good road markings and a smooth, high-quality road surface. But there’s also a lot you don’t see when you’re on a well-constructed highway. For instance, did you know that safety – of all road users, even pedestrians – is a major factor in the planning of a new road? Safety is baked in right from the design and conception phase.

SANRAL’s widening of the Polokwane Ring Road in Limpopo is a great example of road infrastructure designed with safety at its centre.

For those motorists and commuters who never travel outside their city, a ring road isn’t just one thing; it consists of a series of bridges, on- and off-ramps and interchanges that together form a route circumventing a CBD, but with links to all the most used main roads into town. It is a construction of huge proportions from an engineering perspective, that is specifically designed to allow commuters to travel safely and efficiently around a town.

The expansion of the existing Polokwane Ring Road was planned and engineered

to alleviate traffic congestion in the city centre by taking traffic around the town.

Since the start of the project in February 2016, there have been several improvements. The existing 80km/h geometric alignment has been enhanced vertically and horizontally to comply with 100km/h design requirements. Two existing at-grade (level with the road) intersections, at the R37/N1 and Silicon/N1, were turned into gradeseparated interchanges to improve traffic flow and safety. The whole ring road used to be a single carriageway, with just one lane per direction. This expansion by SANRAL not only decreases the heavy traffic flow through the CBD, it specifically highlights the increased safety of using a wider road to get around Polokwane, adding two more lanes per direction.

According to Andrew Mackellar, SANRAL’s Assistant Resident Engineer on the project, one always needs to consider road width, inclines, adequate cornering and braking distances to allow safe stopping and intersections and ramps to access the road safely.

Upgrading existing roads usually creates a bit of disruption to normal traffic, so it’s also important to consider possible detours

for motorists to use while construction is under way. This is why SANRAL built deviation roads to accommodate the everyday traffic, mitigating any disruptions.

These deviation roads allow road users to travel back and forth through the construction zones with minimal effort. Mackellar said that one of the challenges on the Polokwane Ring Road project was actually the construction of the deviation road near the Roodepoort Bridge.

“It was not easy. We had to take people around the R37 and through the community farms. And there was a bit of resistance from the locals; they did not appreciate the extra traffic in the area, or the dust from passing vehicles,” he said.

So to help resolve the conflict, the engineers opted to use a bitumen chemical to supress the dust levels instead of using water. This chemical is made from the same material used for asphalt surfacing and is completely harmless to the environment.

When SANRAL considers safety in its projects, even the environment gets a say. We are comitted to bringing you the best, most efficient and safest national road network in Africa.