Why the City of Joburg has stopped fixing over 200 traffic lights

The City of Joburg’s Roads Agency (JRA) has for the past five months stopped maintaining 231 traffic lights that fall under provincial government jurisdiction.

This decision was due to an expired service-level agreement (SLA) between the JRA and the Gauteng Provincial Department of Roads and Transport, reports MyBroadband.

However, the SLA renewal was already advertised in February 2022 according to the City’s deputy director for communications and stakeholder management Karabo Seane, who spoke to MyBroadband about the matter.

He said the situation is now under adjudication and the City will provide feedback once the proceedings have been finalised.

Failed negotiations

The JRA ceased maintaining 231 traffic lights in April 2022 after negotiations to renew the SLA between the two government entities ground to a halt.

The previous agreement which ran from September 2017 stated that the JRA must design, install, repair, and maintain specific traffic signals under provincial jurisdiction on behalf of the Gauteng province.

This agreement expired in August 2020, however, the JRA continued maintaining the applicable intersections under the terms of the contract.

Since then, numerous bargaining attempts between the departments to renew the SLA fell flat and the Joburg MMC for transport, Funzi Ngobeni, and Gauteng MEC for Roads and Transport, Jacob Mamabolo, therefore agreed to terminate the relationship.

Mamabolo noted that one of the reasons for not renewing the SLA was a tax dispute between the JRA and South African Revenue Services (Sars). Ngobeni said the dispute is currently going through a legal process and the JRA has notified Sars of its intentions to take the matter to tax court.

In the meantime, the process of handing over the 231 intersections to the Gauteng Department of Roads and Transport has been put underway.

The JRA now attends to the 1,992 signalised intersections under its jurisdiction while the provincial department will attend to queries related to its own traffic signals.