City of Joburg says M2 rehabilitation on track and road to open in November

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Joburg residents will only get relief from traffic jams at the end of November. Motorists have been battling long traffic backlogs, especially during rush hour, for most of the year because of the closure of the M2 for bridge rehabilitation. The City of Joburg closed the M2 motorway between Crown Interchange and Maritzburg Street. Yesterday, Tebogo Mogashoa, the spokesperson for MMC for Transport Nonhlanhla Makhuba, said the construction was on track. Mogashoa said: “Once the work has been done, the construction company gets a week or so in order to do the snag lists. This is just to ensure that they picked up on everything and that they have cleared the site.”

She said: “We are within the time frames we set out for the rehabilitation. What they had said would be done right now, they have done. We anticipate that everything will be done by the end of October.”

Earlier this year, Joburg mayor Herman Mashaba said there was a R6.5billion backlog in bridge infrastructure. In a survey conducted in 2017, 3900km of the road network fell into the “poor” or “very poor condition” categories.

The overall acceptable condition indices for bridges in very good and good condition should be a minimum of 80% - currently only 5.77% of city bridges are in acceptable condition.

Some 78.38% of city bridges are in a poor or very poor condition. This means the condition of the bridges has deteriorated at an alarming rate. Since 2013, 37 bridges have collapsed during rainy season.