The City of Cape Town has granted approval for the use of long-term road contracts to ensure “uninterrupted and regular maintenance and rehabilitation” of its vast road network until 2030.
The city’s Urban Mobility Directorate has entered into seven-year contracts with six different companies to service the approximately 10,400km of roads under the Mother City’s management, according to Engineering News.
Long-term upkeep
The new contracts will allow the roads infrastructure management department to do planned routine road maintenance until their expiration date on 30 June 2030.
While the city already has a framework in place for three-year contracts, the timeframe this creates can be problematic for rehabilitation and upgrade projects that go beyond a certain size, said Rob Quintas, the MMC for Urban Mobility.
This is because the investigation and design stages of a new project can take up to 24 months, which is then followed by a procurement process that takes another 12 months before any physical construction actually begins.
Depending on the size of the project, construction will then add another 12 to 24 months to the completion time, meaning large-scale road maintenance and upgrades can have a life cycle of anywhere between three and five years.
Three-year contracts are therefore inefficient for larger projects and can result in awkward leadership transitions, costly delays, and contractual claims if a replacement service provider is not secured before the existing contract expires, explained Quintas.
Maintenance setbacks
Cape Town has made several updates and changes to its road network in recent months, such as adding “smart” speeding signs on busy roads and installing a new warning system for trucks by one of its most infamous bridges.
However, one major hurdle that the city has been forced to confront is mafia groups attempting to extort the various road upgrade programmes it has tried to implement.
In June 2023, it was reported that seven infrastructure projects, which have a combined budget of R58.6 million, were being held up by “mafia-style extortionists” armed with weapons who intimidated the city and its contractors with threats of violence and murder if they did not receive a cut of the public capital.
The city’s official response was that it does not negotiate with extortionists, and there is simply no Rand value for human life.
Keyword: Cape Town promises perfect roads until 2030