When your truck is trying to avoid the potholes along the secondary roads that serve the coal belt in Mpumalanga, or bouncing over corrugated dirt roads in the Northern Cape, have you ever wondered how much these roads cost? Not cost as in build. Rather, what they cost the users who must take their trucks down these roads on a regular basis.

Livison Mashoko of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research’s (CSIR) Built Environment  says, “There is a positive correlation between the PLC (provincial logistics capability) of a province and the provincial economy. And of all the criteria you use to measure PLC, infrastructure – road, rail, ports, pipelines and information technology – far outweigh anything else, followed by labour (their costs and their skills).”

Some of the best roads in South Africa are in the three provinces that contribute the most to our GDP: Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal and the Western Cape.

Mashoko’s calculations spell out a dismal picture for provinces like the Northern Cape and Limpopo. While Mpumalanga comes in fourth after the Big Three, the bottom three are Eastern Cape and Limpopo, with Northern Cape stone last (Free State and North West tie for a middle spot). And their poor infrastructure plays an important role in that ranking.

A great deal of our agriculture and mining for minerals takes place in provinces like Northern Cape, Limpopo and Eastern Cape. Which means a whole lot of hauliers take their trucks over less-than-delightful roads regularly to move produce and product from source to distribution or storage point. What costs do these poor roads exact from the freight businesses?

Reduced profit means less tax

Adds Professor Wynand Steyn of the University of Pretoria, who together with Wilna Bean of the CSIR has been doing research on the impact of road quality,“We know that bad riding quality on a road has potentially negative effects on logistics, operations, and the cost of business. It causes structural damage to vehicles which results in increased vehicle maintenance and repair costs, and ultimately higher logistics costs to the company.  But this has far-reaching implications.  If the road is in a bad condition, it’s going to cost them money. If the company’s profit drops, his tax drops in tandem- that means government loses revenue, and that in turn means there’s less in the fiscus to pay for upkeep of the roads.”

Steyn and Bean have been doing something that they believe has only been done in California. They are trying to quantify an overarching cost of poor road quality that pulls together not just the damage to tyres and engines, but also the damage or loss to the actual freight carried, as well as other losses such as lost time due to slower trips, and damage such as additional carbon emissions. They are hoping to arrive at an assessment which, though it is unlikely to ever be perfect, will give an idea of the total cost of what pavement engineers (those working on road surfaces) call ‘poor riding quality’. This can then be weighed in the balance against the cost of repairing or upgrading roads.

Extensive road network

Professor Steyn says, “There is, believe it or not, something called the International Roughness Index (IRI), which is used to measure the condition of roads. According to the scale, 1.5 or better on this index is good; 6 and higher is a really terrible road, with the ideal less than 2. For every jump of 1 point on this index, your fuel consumption jumps by 2%. Our national average on SANRAL roads is 1.68, but several of our roads weight in at over 2 – Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal and Mpumalanga, for instance, with the Free State’s roads scoring a whopping 3.87.”

“The effects of poor road conditions can be significant,” says Professor Steyn, even if you simply take into account the impact on fuel costs and vehicle maintenance. Analysis of the country’s 22 main road corridors (such as the route from Gauteng to Durban) and comparing national roads with provincial roads reveals that poor road conditions result in an additional 28,864 kilolitres of fuel consumption, an extra R28,5 million in tyre costs and an additional R359 million in vehicle repair and maintenance costs.”

Concluding, “Add to that losses thanks to damaged freight and you lose 0.62 kg of wheat per tonne which may seem small but adds up over millions of tonnesand it is beginning to look as though repairing and maintaining roads in the best condition possible will be good for farmers, hauliers and fiscus alike!”