South Africa’s richest city has a traffic light problem

The Johannesburg Roads Agency (JRA) said the city needs R70 million to fix its broken traffic lights and replace stolen ones.

The JRA’s acting head of mobility and freight, Sipho Nhlapo, told Newzroom Afrika that around 396 traffic lights in the city are vandalised.

Of these, about 202 are still functional, while the remaining 194 are completely out of order.

“194 sites are totally vandalised,” Nhlapo said. “If you had to go on that site, you won’t find a pole, you won’t find cable, you won’t find anything – and we need to rebuild those from scratch.”

He added that, at any given time, around 25% of Joburg’s intersections are not working due to power problems, which stem from sources such as Eskom and City Power.

In addition, many of Joburg CBD’s intersections were done many years ago with a very weak form of paper insulation.

This means that they are very vulnerable to heavy rain, which South Africa has experienced a lot of during the 2024/25 Summer season, and they will often just start “flashing” as a result.

This issue has only gotten worse over the last few years since the installation of fibre cables has meant that road surfaces are weaker than they were before.

He estimated that around 488 traffic lights are not working at any point, which increases to close to 600 when including the “functioning” vandalised poles that also need to be fixed.

Nhlapo explained that there are also a number of traffic signals in intersections that make up the “spine of the city” which have been out consistently, regardless of weather or power conditions.

These include Beyers Naudé Drive, Fourways, the Golden Highway, Gordon Road, Grayston Drive, and Hendrik Potgieter Road.

According to Nhlapo, the Gauteng provincial government previously managed these intersections, but they recently entered into an agreement with the JRA to help rebuild about 16 intersections along this spine.

“I think in the next few weeks, you’re going to start seeing a big difference along those spines,” he said.

As a part of this effort, they are working on building 60 traffic lights, which he said will gradually start coming online.

Some of these repairs are easy, “quick wins”, which means that the lights will be in working order fairly quickly, while others are more complicated and will take longer to repair.

At some intersections, however, the damage is so extreme that it needs to be rebuilt entirely.

Security elements will also have to be introduced at those intersections to avoid vandalisation incidents in the future.

He assured South Africa that by 15 March, about 15 to 25 of these intersections should be operational again.

Earlier this year, Joburg councillor and Roads and Transport Portfolio Committee member in the metro, Sean Kreusch, told Newzroom Afrika that the traffic signal problem is the result of substantial budget cuts.

In 2016/17, the Johannesburg Roads Agency’s (JRA) capital budget was approximately R1.4 billion. However, this amount decreased to just R859.65 million by 2023/2024.

This represents a nearly 60% reduction in the budget over a period of seven years.

These budget cuts have a direct impact on maintenance and operational capacity, as only two to three teams are tasked with managing 2,000 traffic signals.

“Coupled with that, the city has a road network of roughly 12,000 km. It was estimated that you would need to do 1,000 km per annum in order to maintain that network, and we’re only averaging 150 km to 180 km,” Kreusch said.

“Signals have become a casualty of the financial restraints of the city.”

Kreusch noted that the Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality is grappling with major issues, largely due to the memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the province and the city.

Under this agreement, the city is tasked with maintaining traffic poles on provincial roads like William Nicol Drive, the R511, Cedar Road, and Sandton Drive.

However, the provincial government has not compensated the JRA for this maintenance, leading to a backlog of payments.

The city also faces challenges such as a shortage of spare parts, limited cabling access, and strict regulations.

For example, technicians repairing traffic signals cannot handle the power box unless an Eskom-qualified technician is present, as they do not have the required wiring authority.