Statement by Brett Herron, GOOD Secretary-General and member of the Western Cape Provincial Parliament
19 July 2021
Data from a report prepared by the City of Cape Town’s Transport Department shows that the City’s road network is in critical condition and at risk of “further deterioration”.
The report shows that before the last few weeks of heavy rainfall, there was already a backlog of 35 000 potholes in need of repair across the city.
That’s a 40-fold increase on the 900 threshold maintenance number set just four years ago – and following recent rains, the situation will now be even worse.
When I was Mayco Member for Transport in the City of Cape Town we aimed to repair potholes as fast as we could. To ensure we kept on top of road maintenance, we set a threshold of trying to never have more than 900 reports of potholes in our system waiting to be repaired.
Occasionally, numbers would escalate above the threshold, but our teams worked to keep or bring them back below the threshold as fast as possible.
In October 2018 I resigned from the City due to conservatives in its DA caucus stymying all efforts to build affordable housing in inner-city Cape Town.
At the first council meeting following my resignation, in December 2018, Mayor Dan Plato and the DA Caucus voted to dismantle and shut down the Transport Authority.
With it, they also voted to collapse the City’s Transport Authority Management System.
The collapse of the Transport Management System meant that the information system was “no longer being actioned”. Part of the management system related to maintaining road infrastructure – including the information system underpinning the pothole repair service.
Following the collapse of the Transport Authority, and the collapse of the associated information systems, the report in my possession shows that there has been a forty-fold increase in the number of potholes across the city – prior to the recent wet weather.
The City has destroyed its road maintenance system and capacity.
There are now more than 35 000 potholes needing to be fixed and 7242 km, or 70%, of the road network, is in need of immediate preventative maintenance.
When you fall very far behind with the maintenance of critical infrastructure it can be very difficult to catch up again, as we’ve experienced with Eskom.
Potholes and deteriorating road conditions create a serious danger for all road users, and a backlog of 35 000 potholes creates a massive financial and economic risk to the City of Cape Town and its residents.
The overwhelming majority of potholed, and poorly maintained, roads are in poor communities – a metaphor for the city skewed infrastructure provision and service delivery.
The DA led government has allowed our road network to collapse. We will all pay for this in the end.