Heavy duty vehicles and trucks have always been a menace on our roads, however, fast-forward to the demise of Transnet freight trains, we, of late, must live with driving alongside heavy load trucks that have become an added hazard on our roads.
It’s scary. Driving on the main national roads and having to manoeuvre your way past the humongous, sometimes 19m-long truck, travelling at a speed of 80km/h and swerving sideways, day or night, has become somewhat of a nightmare.
Parastatal Transnet, under which the South Africa’s freight rail trains fall, has over the years been run down and dilapidated due to two decades of corruption.
While all types of cargo are being diverted from railways, our roads are taking a toll. Other motorists are inconvenienced on the country’s busiest routes, especially the Mpumalanga coal corridor to the coastal harbour cities of Richards Bay and Durban, it’s not funny.
We’ve witnessed, more so on social media, convoys of heavily loaded trucks carrying all types of hazardous material being transported through urban build-up areas. A case in point is the Boksburg, Ekurhuleni, disaster in December, where the death toll has since risen to 41 people.
If Transnet is still much in charge of freight rail transport, why must we have to carry the burden of having to contend with long convoys of trucks, some stretching over 200m at a time, steadily winding their way in urban areas, blocking traffic, and disrupting livelihoods?
South Africa has a road network of 750 000km, the 10th-longest in the world, but not all the country’s roads are managed by Sanral. The entity only manages 21,403kms, provinces 47 300kms and 51 600kms managed by municipalities.
All tiers of government are responsible for the atrocious state of our roads.
Adding more woes for motorists is the condition of roads as more trucking and road-based logistics companies prefer transporting their “goods” through the road network, rather than the unreliable rail.
Several case studies attribute the preference of road transportation because of vandalism brought about by years of corruption, notwithstanding the situation being made untenable by two years of heavy Covid-19 lockdowns.
“More than 150-million tons of cargo was transported by road between January and March 2021, compared to just 40-million tons moved by rail. The recovery in road freight is clear to see with over 6, 00 trucks a day passing the Tugela toll plaza, which is very close to pre-pandemic levels.
“In addition, other truck indicators report very high truck counts in metropolitan areas such as Nelson Mandela Bay, Johannesburg, and Tshwane,” the Ctrack Freight Transport Index revealed in April last year.
Bewilderingly unbelievable is how the highest income-earning commodities for the country’s fiscus, coal and iron ore exports, are now being transported to the coastal harbours by road.
There has been a huge drop in volume transported by Transnet because of the re-routing of coal to trucks because critical rail corridors are dilapidated owing to years of lack of maintenance and uncertainty whether the goods will reach their intended destination. Just like Eskom’s failure to provide the country with constant electricity supply, Transnet puts the blame on rampant vandalism for the downward spiralling of the reliability of the rail infrastructure.
Once again, social media has been at the forefront in exposing the hazards the heavy load trucks subject motorists to. Last year, the Road Traffic Management Corporation told all and sundry it was investigating the case involving a speeding truck that went viral on video. No report was made public on the investigation. We are still waiting.
I must hasten to say it is now up to incumbent transport minister Fikile Mbalula’s successor to deal with the mess on our roads.
As motorists, including the heavy load truck drivers, we have to bear the brunt of driving on appalling and dangerous roads, the condition made intolerable by years of neglect, resulting in potholes, vandalised street lights and broken robots, all contributing to the
resultant road carnage.
Follow @SundayWorldZA on Twitter and @sundayworldza on Instagram, or like our Facebook Page, Sunday World, by clicking here for the latest breaking news in South Africa. To Subscribe to Sunday World, click here
