A partnership agreement for road asset management has been signed between the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and Roads Agency Limpopo (RAL) to help manage, maintain and improve the region’s ailing roads. The agreement would help the agency overcome related challenges in roads infrastructure.
Roads Agency Limpopo (RAL) has said that they would need US$10.14bn for all the maintenance of road infrastructure that it is managing, and CSIR would assist in the endeavor.
According to the CEO for Roads Agency Limpopo (RAL), Petrus Matji, the firm doesn’t have the money and therefore would need to overcome the barrier by working smarter with its available resources that it has, adding Engineers and scientists from CSIR will be of great assistance with this.
Matji moted that the focus will be on road asset management which will include creation of the roads inventory, assessment of roads condition and calculation of the deterioration rates to help identify which roads need urgent renovation and upgrades. Thus the road asset management would help in the road infrastructure budgeting initiatives and overcoming of infrastructure challenges in a holistic fashion.
The Environment Built Executive Director for CSIR, Dr Cornelius Ruiters noted that the partnership was of great importance too to their company as it would have a wide impact. He noted that roads in Limpopo are of great importance to the economy of the country due to the fact that Limpopo is bordered by three countries. Roads open up room for freight transport and eco-tourism.
Elsewhere, Sanral has recently received US$0.1bn for upgrading of the R573 Moloto road to link Limpopo province to Pretoria and Mpumalanga.
