South African metros cannot afford to repair traffic lights – replaces them with stop signs

Some of South Africa’s biggest municipalities, including Johannesburg, Nelson Mandela Bay, and Polokwane, are plagued by traffic light and infrastructure theft and cannot afford to fix or replace them.

After a local businessman’s protest, the Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality’s head for roads and transport, Yolisa Pali-Jongilanga, told a council committee that the city cannot justify repairing the same traffic lights because thieves strip cables within weeks.

“We cannot afford to continuously repair the same traffic lights every three months due to repeated acts of vandalism. It almost seems as though we are feeding the thieves each time we do repairs,” she said.

The Eastern Cape municipality is not the only one dealing with this issue, as motorists in Pietermaritzburg spend hours in peak traffic when intersections along key routes are out.

In July, the Johannesburg Roads Agency (JRA) said more than 300 of its traffic signals had stolen or vandalised equipment, with the lights at Chadwick Avenue and 5th Street in Wynberg having been out for more than a year.

Residents in Polokwane also reported that 21 intersections had broken lights, while some municipal councils have stopped repairing lights at the worst-hit intersections.

According to the Automobile Association (AA) of South Africa, Ekurhuleni spent roughly R120 million on repairs before replacing signals at some high-risk intersections with stop signs.

Some of them may become permanent, as they have in Centurion after the city decommissioned the signals at Botha and Hoffmeyer streets and downgraded the intersection to a three-way stop.

To combat this, the AA has called on municipalities to publish a list of their broken traffic lights and streetlights and expects each fault to carry a reference number and a repair date.

Bobby Ramagwede, CEO of the AA, said mobility is the freedom to get to work, children to school and get home again.

“Every dead intersection takes some of that freedom away, and it takes it first from the people who walk,” he declared.

Prioritising key intersections

The AA called on municipalities to prioritise fixing routes to schools and busy pedestrian corridors first, explaining that while theft may explain a broken light, it does not excuse municipalities for leaving them broken.

“The first step costs almost nothing: publish the list. A motorist sitting at a dead robot has no way of knowing whose it is or when it will work again,” said Ramagwede.

“Tell them, then fix it in the order you said you would. We will keep pressing councils to fix the lights.”

Failing to do so also costs local businesses and households, with the Centre for Risk Analysis warning that road safety and economic costs rise the longer signals go unrepaired.

The AA claimed that the JRA carries a maintenance backlog of more than R115 billion against an annual budget of R1.8 billion, and in June, Johannesburg stopped fueling the agency’s vehicles.

Sitting at broken traffic signals also burns more fuel, since a queue at a dead intersection becomes a line of idling engines in stop-start traffic, and every car burns fuel to go almost nowhere.

For some commuters stuck in afternoon traffic for around an hour, this adds up to two litres burnt while barely moving.

The AA welcomed the government’s recent fuel levy relief announcement, but noted that it has a second lever that has nothing to do with the oil price.

“A driver idling at a broken robot is paying for fuel that takes them nowhere,” stated Ramagwede.

“Fix the light and that money stays in their pocket. It is a saving the government can start delivering this week, and it starts with a list.”