South African is a country in transition where first and third world standards need to meet one another. The demands of the majority of the people in South Africa are mainly focused on social upliftment of the poor, education and health as well as the provision of basic services such as housing, clean water and sanitation. Because of these demands on Government resources, the development of transportation infrastructure did not keep up with the demand especially in urban areas such as Gauteng. Traffic congestion is experienced on these freeways where traffic volumes ranges between 100 000 and 180 000 on a daily basis. Traffic congestion has a negative impact on freeway network operations. In order to improve the current situation, various alternatives are being explored. These alternatives can be categorized as follow: Expansion of the road network by means of the provision of new infrastructure; The upgrading/widening of existing infrastructure; and optimization of existing infrastructure by means of congestion management utilising Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). The first two options are well known. The costs and benefits of these options can be modeled and quantified. However, congestion management, and especially ITS were developed in technological advanced countries since the early 1990's. ITS as an integrated traffic and congestion management tool has however not been tested in South Africa. The implementation of ITS on national freeways is therefore different to technological countries in the sense that South Africa's needs and user population are different. The South African National Roads Agency Limited (SANRAL) initiated an ITS pilot project focused on freeway management in order to: determine user requirements, develop functional specifications, develop a regional architecture, determine benefits and costs of various ITS applications, determine the feasibility of ITS as a tool to increase road capacity, measure the effectiveness of the above mentioned against other options such as expansion of the road system and value engineering upgrading of the existing road network, measure the effectiveness of the systems implemented The feasibility stage of the project was completed and concluded that ITS subsystems for capacity improvement for recurrent congestion is not feasible if compared especially to value engineering optimization of infrastructure. However, ITS as a tool for freeway network management and especially incident management is regarded to be feasible and certain ITS subsystems such as ramp metering, Closed Circuit Television (CCTV), Variable Message Signs (VMS) and a control centre will be implemented on a pilot project basis. However, it is critical that ITS systems are not implemented in isolation but are considered as part of the provision of new road infrastructure. For the covering abstract see ITRD E135448.
Abstract