State-of-the-Art of Road Transport - South Africa

The South African road network comprises some 754,600 km of streets and roads. The South African Department of Transport (DOT), together with the South African National Roads Agency Ltd (SANRAL), the nine provinces and local authorities are responsible for the network. SANRAL is an independent, statutory agency responsible for the design, construction, management and maintenance of South Africa's national road network, including toll and non-toll roads. The national road network is world-class and provides excellent regional connectivity.

A road-classification system includes the following categories:

• 9,600 km of surfaced national toll and non-toll roads
• 56,000 km of surfaced provincial roads
• 300,000 km of gravel provincial roads
• 168,000 km of surfaced and un-surfaced urban roads
• 221,000 km of unclassified roads (predominantly access roads in rural communities and roads in settlements on the urban periphery).

Affordable and accessible public transport is seen as the most significant contribution road transport departments can make to reducing unemployment and poverty, bearing in mind that public transport costs consume more than 20% of the income of poor households. Approximately two percent of the population do not travel at all because they cannot afford public transport.In rural areas, some 71% of those employed (workers) and students travel by foot, as compared with 29.4% in urban areas. The percentage of the employed and students who travel to their workplace or school by private car in urban areas is 33%, while it is substantially lower (10.9%) in rural areas.

In urban areas, the minibus “taxi” is a favoured option (21%) whereas this accounts for only 7.5% in rural areas. The minibus “taxi” as a public transport mode is dominant in comparison to bus and rail. This is particularly true in the urban areas where minibus “taxis” are second only to private cars as the mode of choice. The dominance of private cars is particularly evident in the urban areas of the wealthier provinces of the Western Cape and Gauteng.

The main metropolitan centres - Cape Town, Durban, Ekurhuleni, Johannesburg and Tshwane (Pretoria) - have sophisticated road networks with responsive or adaptive traffic signal control systems with various types of traffic control centres where surveillance cameras are also incorporated, mainly for crime control purposes at the current time.