Getting
around town

Why do we build ring roads? Mostly for safety, but also to drive efficient trade over long distances

South Africa has many ring roads – Musina, Polokwane, Ermelo, Vryburg, King Williams Town and Kimberley, to name a few. When a ring road is being planned, the first reaction is that it will kill business in the affected town. But that is never the intention. The reason we build ring roads is to relieve congestionby taking traffic around the city and to make driving for long-distance travellers safer and less stressful.
Musina, right in the north of the country in Limpopo, bordering on Zimbabwe, is a prime example. It’s an 8km-long ring road that will divert traffic from the Beitbridge border post around the Musina central business district. The contract is worth R625m. The ring road project has come a long way – the old Transvaal Provincial Administration provided for a road reserve before 1994, SANRAL identified the need for such a road in 2006 and the town council supported the proposal for an alternate road to the N1 in 2007.
A thousand heavy vehicles use the N1 every day, coming from Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi and the DRC, in addition to all the South African trucks going north. They clogged up Musina’s roads, which wasn’t particularly safe for local pedestrians or traffic. And, naturally, this throughput of trucks damaged the town’s infrastructure.
The ring road doesn’t mean there’s no access to the town. It lies to the west of the town, with two interchanges and two access roads.
Ring roads avoid high-trafficked and congested road sections and provide an alternate route for traffic not intending to do business within the town centres, which results in less congestion within the towns and lower operating costs for vehicles using the ring road.
This is the reason for the two ring roads around Butterworth and Dutywa in the Eastern Cape.
As the Musina ring road shows, planning has to be done well in advance. The same is true for the one at King Williams Town. When the ring road becomes a reality, it will allow traffic between Port Elizabeth and East London to bypass the town – a necessary development, as it is already anticipated that traffic flows will increase to such an extent that congestion in the town will be a serious problem.
That takes looking 10 to 15 years ahead. The focus presently is on planning and preliminary design requirements. Detailed design and construction are only expected to start somewhere around 2030. These things take time. The N3 between Durban and Pietermaritzburg – an 84km stretch – is planned to be upgraded over the next decade, due to the need for fewer crashes and time delays. It will improve the economic value of this very busy link between the Indian Ocean harbour and the industrial heart of Gauteng and its wider mining areas.
The road carries in excess of 40 million tons of freight per year, with approximately 9 000 heavy vehicles every day. The N3 takes in excess of 40 000 vehicles per day around Pietermaritzburg, consisting of a mix of urban commuter traffic, long-distance traffic and a substantial number of heavy vehicles.