'It's against the law to repair potholes yourself without permission': Sanral

While scores of frustrated motorists and residents have been repairing potholes themselves after waiting weeks, months or even years, road authorities have warned it is illegal to do so without permission. 

Minister of transport Sindisiwe Chikunga and the SA National Road Agency (Sanral) on Monday launched the Vala Zonke war room in Centurion to collate data on potholes reported on the Vala Zonke app.

With the app, one can submit a photo of a pothole to the war room to co-ordinate and communicate with the relevant authorities to repair it immediately.

However, many individuals and organisations have been patching up potholes at their own cost.

Sanral warned this is against the law unless permission has been granted by any of the country's 288 road authorities. These include the transport department, municipalities, provincial governments and Sanral, chair Themba Mhambi said.

“Which would mean that if a road falls under Sanral as an authority, you may not ... do anything on that road without the permission of Sanral,” he said.

This is for the sake of determining culpability should issues arise on the road or from the pothole patched by a resident without approval.

“If you have done so without the relevant road authority, all you are doing is causing problems for that authority because legally, whoever has a claim (of damage) will go to that authority and that authority may not have the luxury of even knowing who among the public interfered with the road.

“If you look at insurance companies which have been helping, particularly in Johannesburg, you will find there is a partnership between those insurance companies and the municipality so that there is no confusion as to the permissibility of what they are doing,” Mhambi said.

How the war room will deal with potholes

The Vala Zonke app was launched in August last year and enables people from across all provinces to lodge complaints of potholes from their cellphones, which the war room will process and communicate the progress on them through the app.

Sanral CEO Reginald Demana said while the programme works with provincial and municipal governments which also maintain their own roads, each province has been grouped into one of three clusters.

“We have three clusters and 22 operators who will be sitting here daily with their managers. The department of transport will have about three representatives sitting here with our staff. The provinces have been asked to nominate two people each to directly interact with this centre to co-ordinate all our efforts in road maintenance, particularly fixing of potholes.”

He said the expected turnaround time for repairing a pothole will be 14 days and such information will be able to determine the number of potholes reported and how many have been fixed.

“We will also be able to see how much money is being spent. One of the issues of accountability is to see if you are fixing the same pothole a number of times. This should be indicative of the quality of work being done ... Sometimes a road has way too many potholes in one area, it may indicate not a pothole problem but a road that needs full refurbishment,” Demana said.

Improving the roads with technology

The country’s total road network is estimated at 750,000km,  the 11th longest in the world.

But the majority of roads, 591,000km, are gravel roads which are maintained with 25% of the budget allocated to each province.

Provinces receive close to R13bn per year for road maintenance from the department, with 75% of the budget allocated to road maintenance and repairing potholes.

However, surfacing a road using conventional technologies such as tar costs about R10m per kilometre, which translates to a required budget of R100bn.

With the use of nanotechnologies, Chikunga said this could reduce the high cost to R3m per kilometre.

“We are identifying the cheapest way of maintaining our roads ... There is technology that is durable including nano ... We need to maintain our gravel roads. We can use yellow fleet to re-gravel them but where there are funds, we can use durable materials like nano material. That is why we have this war room, that talks to the patching of potholes but on the greater scale, the maintenance of 750,000km of road network, so people have roads they can use.”

The app has recorded 618 potholes, all of which have been repaired. However, this amount dates back to February as the latest information is not yet known, Sanral spokesperson Vusi Mona told TimesLIVE.

He said the figure of 618 is for the potholes on Sanral’s national road network.

“There are several potholes that have been reported and repaired on other networks too, but information and logging has not been effectively done by all road authorities to enable us to have an accurate number across the board. It is for this reason that the Vala Zonke war room has been commissioned. Not only to unlock bottlenecks but also to track the actual work to accurately measure progress.”

TimesLIVE