THE Garden Route District Municipality (GRDM) is aware of the situation and an inspection was done on 24 February 2020.
For perspective it should be taken into account that the GRDM serves 6500 km roads as an agent of Western Cape Government – 2700 km from this are minor roads which are maintained at a very low level and are usually limited to one blading per annum. Apart from minor roads, we serve 3037 km of gravel and 680 km of paved roads. This is done by 15 maintenance teams and 16 grader teams.
For upgrading and improvement of roads, GRDM have capacity to do approximately 45km of regravel work per year and upgrade of roads about 2km per annum. At the regravel of roads, the availability of approved gravel resources is also a major challenge and is determining whether there can be any regravel in an area or not.
The backlog is therefor very large and is still growing.
These roads (regravel and upgrading) are identified by Province with input from GRDM. Annually a panel consisting of provincial and GRDM officials do a physical inspection on all roads on the priority list. One of the major factors for prioritising is traffic counts. Other factors that are considered are existing gravel thickness, economic activities, type of farming, tourism etc.
This panel then determines the priority and regravel programme for the next financial year. At our maintenance section, we do not have any other capacity to do any form of upgrading or regravel of roads.
The Middelplaas Road (DR 1707) was part of the panel inspection but is unfortunately not currently on the programmed regravel lists. The road is currently 48th on the combined priority list in GRDM. Roads that are currently scheduled has an AADT (annual average daily traffic) of between 350 and 600 vehicles per day. Official AADT for DR 1707 is 123 vehicles.
Meanwhile, GRDM maintenance teams will do the best to maintain the roads.
The Oudtshoorn East maintenance team (truck with supervisor and 8 people), as well as grader team (operators with graders with 2 people) responsible for the roads in Middelplaas area maintain 31 km of surfaced roads, 199 km gravel roads and 166 km minor roads.
Our capacity by road is therefore extremely limited. It is not possible to maintain the roads to the expectations of the public, road users and other role players. The roads are bladed according to cycles. This ensures that the capacity is shared fairly amongst all roads in the ward.
Only emergency works were done in December. The roads will be maintained further according to priority and monthly cycles.
