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Tawanda Mdawarima Correspondent
EXPLAIN to me again why the man on the street gets super-excited about the topic of dualisation of Beitbridge-Chirundu regional trunk road? I get it that people can ululate about the concept of a multi-lane road criss-crossing their neighbourhood. I get it too that whichever politician owning such a project will score on popularity. But let us get a few issues into correct perspective. Is it necessary? Is it priority? Who are the intended beneficiaries? What engineering justification has driven it?

Who is calling for it? Capacity demand or Honourable Minister?

Who is making most noise demanding dualisation to be effected? Is it the cross-border trader from South Africa to Zambia? Or is it the ordinary citizen of Mutare, Gweru, Kwekwe or Bulawayo? How much of the motoring public does this interest group represent? Is it higher than the suburban driver and passengers navigating on potholed streets, commuting from home to work daily?

In the past this call for dualisation has been spearheaded more by politicians than technocrats. We are fed information that the reason this project is so important is to reduce road carnage and encourage increase in flow of traffic for trade. Really? I thought the primary reason for dualisation was because traffic was already almost at full capacity on an existing road, not to reduce crashes nor to attract future traffic. Seasoned technocrats should confirm to you that dualisation is a function of capacity first, other things secondary.

Obvious examples exist. On Harare–Chitungwiza road link, if you imagine that road being one lane per direction, there would be a massive queue of vehicles in the morning rush along the length of road, with impatience forcing even the normally careful driver to try to overtake. It’s not the road crash which is the primary problem. That is a result of the road operating at full capacity causing delays, frustrations and undesirable behavioural influence. The minute you provide additional lanes, flow immediately increases since at a certain point, instead of one vehicle passing there can be now up to four in one direction.

Harare-Norton road link is another example. The same is pretty obvious for urban major roads linking some residential areas to workplaces or town centres.

When you talk of dualising Beitbridge-Harare, Harare-Chirundu, Harare-Mutare, Harare-Bulawayo, you drop the ball. Traffic volumes drastically drop once you leave the urban radii of 10km outside towns in most cases.

Most traffic is local. The inter-city roads then no longer operate at anywhere close to full capacity. Depending on terrain, different dynamics start to play. Unfortunately, where a road crash occurs, instead of addressing root causes politicians at times prescribe a solution approaching it with a bias without necessary calling for investigations nor consulting with technocrats.

And it becomes difficult once a public announcement has been made for technocrats to be seen disagreeing with the declared policy, for that is what it becomes once a public announcement like that is further endorsed by those in authority who become emotionally attached to the case.

It is made that much worse where a person has travelled on typically dual lane N1 North highway in Republic of South Africa or elsewhere and comes back thinking that it’s the way engineering should be done locally. Yet SA is doing it for its own community, industries and trade benefit.

Talk of Road Carnage

Here is the deal. A number of road crashes can be attributed to dangerous overtaking due to poor judgment by drivers at high speeds. The issue is then not to dualise the whole road but rather to introduce strategic overtaking lanes only at specific road rises, because the climbing gradients slow down heavy traffic, which should then yield to the slow lane to allow impatient drivers to pass without killing anyone. The downward lane remains as is. And we employ these overtaking lanes at all identified spots. Technocrats can identify them from the design coupled with traffic crash data.

Every time there is a bad road crash an announcement is made that the roads are too narrow and dualisation is the solution. And this is where I silently scream, IT’S NOT DUALISATION. Try just shoulder widening if that’s the cause! I travel a number of times from Beitbridge to either Bulawayo or Harare. I am able to travel freely at the maximum allowable speed until I catch up with a slower vehicle after a long travel.

At such point, where visibility allows, I safely overtake. And where the road is in a rising winding area, I get to feel where the overtaking lanes could be effectively placed. What I can say is that even on straight stretches, animals, donkeys on the loose pose the greatest danger on some sections of the roads. We “widened” the portion of Beitbridge-Bulawayo road adding the shoulders, but at certain times and locations, there is always some animal-vehicle crashes, especially at night.

On a number of cases also the state of the vehicles along these corridors has been the cause of road crashes. Burst tyres, failed breaks, high speeds in low-performance vehicles have caused some horrendous crashes on these roads. One must understand that dualisation will not suddenly sanitise a foolish driver. One doesn’t suddenly behave well because the road has dualised. In fact, only the nature of road crash will change. It is proven that psychologically when drivers see a wider road passage, their speeds tend to increase and drivers push their vehicles to the limit unless there is very effective policing. In some major developed nations there is deliberate narrowing of passages to passively reduce speeds.

Is it priority for now?

Why should I seem to be against wholesome dualisation? Because engineers don’t work “outside the box”. They do not prescribe solutions blind to prevailing economic and social environment. Road designs must take into account sustainability, affordability of client and the public benefit.

Remembering too that the highways are not always benefiting the communities through which they pass. A village along a dualised highway is not going to benefit from fast moving traffic past its village. And if we are building these roads for benefit of some travelling cross-border truck passing through to Zambia or Malawi then our priorities need revisiting.

It makes no sense for the nation to commit to unnecessarily dualise roads at a very minimum estimate cost of US$350 000 to US$700 000 per km per lane as national priority while there are many other competing sectors that would critically benefit from such funding being available.

The health sector, the education eector, public health (water and sanitation), the civil service, you can add to the list, there will definitely be a sector that could do with the money more urgently. Roads are not a once-off investment. You will need to revisit the road every seven years and pump substantial amount into it to rejuvenate the riding surface. A similar expenditure into hospitals, schools, medicines, water supply, civil servants pay, will go a long way in uplifting the quality of life of many more ordinary citizens than improving road corridors for the sake of cross-border trucks passing the country in transit. It may make much less sense now if such trucks we are trying to cater for have a Kazungula Route option. If the “region” wants those roads, let the “region” contribute to their funding.

Which Traffic?

The average traffic volume in most of these major corridors is so low no serious investor would bother trying to create a tolled corridor with the hope of recouping their investment in reasonable time. We investigated financing models but either one would end up charging an exorbitant toll fee or go broke with people going through alternative routes unless Government forces people to use the toll route.

The reason currently our tollgates belong to Government and no alternative route has been provided is because serious investors who do their homework and know their business could not come up with a free market financial model that would see them getting their investment back in good enough time. I get suspicious of any investor who comes to the country and says they will invest in BOT (Build, Operate, Transfer) on some of our road corridors; it tells me that they either don’t know their business or they are eyeing something beyond roads, and investment is a red herring, or it could be just grand standing.

Let’s please prioritise

This brings me to my point. I beg responsible people to allow technocrats to do their work without undue duress. They are competent. They are the same departmental technocrats that are scooped up into the Diaspora to build the very highways their leaders think they can’t produce.

It is about prioritisation. We need to prioritise resources to priority areas. Prioritisation can only occur of course when you are well informed. It is what I have advocated on how to effectively deal with road safety. If you have 10 traffic cops and 10 locations where crashes occur you should not blindly distribute enforcers in equal numbers to these locations. You need to prioritise. Establish which location has the most crashes and which does not have. Establish which days have highest crash numbers, which times, which province, then distribute the traffic enforcers in roughly the same ratio.

If road carnage is at that level of national priority, then by all means let’s throw what we have got to it to address it in the same proportion to the rest of competing priorities. Let’s have the whole nation prioritising resources and intervention to it. The National Budget should reflect this proportionate prioritised allocation.

The Traffic Police will intervene through increased visibility and active enforcement at and around the area. The emergency services will have ambulances dedicated for rapid deployment to the areas at such critical times. And let’s campaign to educate the public about the dangers of that specific location made through media.

All the time statistics will remain being taken and periodic reviews of data made to establish if new priority areas on road crashes have occurred. All the while detailed investigations and analysis of data by technocrats will be continuing to always try to establish the root cause of the crashes at particular spots and particular times, of particular nature, engineering improvements of identified locations also keeping pace, all this assuming carnage is that high!

I know about the tremendous faith of the woman who begged Jesus for bread before the children had their fill, but that was like exception. In most other cases, the children must benefit first. This applies to whatever policies or interventions, the children must be first priority. The Roads Department does not have for now adequate funds to conduct proper periodic and enhanced maintenance on the network. Allocations they are provided are normally below economic level that just the management of the funds before intervention on the ground wipes away a huge part of allocation. Where then has all of a sudden all the money come from to move this from a barely surviving allocation to an extravagant expenditure on a dualised road with barely 40 vehicles for average annual hourly traffic?

If we say the public will have to pay are we not throwing them into fire? Can they afford it? If the investor is trading against some other important commodity we have in our nation, is it worth the bargain? Are we not pawning our future? What we could be looking at is developing local industries to such a level that it no longer becomes important then to have roads for imports, and at that point like SA we would improve the roads for primarily our exporters to have safe, fast travel to the region to sell our wares.

Let’s talk about this. It could be what you need for now is just shoulder construction at strategic locations and phased overtaking lanes at much lower cost using local contractors . . .  perhaps?? How about investing in improved rail and moving all unnecessary heavy haulage off from the roads??

Tawanda Mdawarima is a Civil Engineering Consultant: Roads and Project Management. BEng Civil MNIT, Univ. Raj. ASAICE, APMSA, MPMI; former Deputy Director (Roads), former board member ZINARA, PIARC Developing Countries Road Safety Expert.