VAIDS

Monday, February 22, 2016

Holistic path to Lighten Load on Main Trade Road

Nowhere is Africa more developed than along its trade and industrial corridors; yet they also provide graphic lessons on how dreams die in the crossfire of economic development.
Villages and towns took root and grew across Africa along routes carved over centuries by road, rail and rivers. Some of them grew into cities, while others succumbed to neglect and failure.
 A loading crane straddles a freight rail track at Transnet’s container handling terminal at City Deep inland port in Johannesburg. Picture: BLOOMBERG
Some threw up their first shacks, trading posts and saloons when traffic meant lumbering mule-and ox-drawn carts. A century later, many surviving cities’ populations number in seven figures. Trains and trucks thunder through them.

Much money and muscle is being pumped into converting to an industrial corridor the N3 from Johannesburg to Durban via the Free State to grow the regions and decongest SA’s busiest land transport link. It is called the Durban-Free State-Johannesburg Logistics and Industrial Corridor.
The N3 groans with traffic, much of it growing fleets of very heavy cargo leviathans. It is SA’s most important transport artery.

Along it pumps the lifeblood of Gauteng, providing sustenance to its 12-million people, coursing along 600km from the Durban port to Johannesburg. Most of it is delivered to the City Deep inland port south of Johannesburg’s city centre. The gargantuan freight receiving and dispatching operation is a world beater.

Inevitably, such a huge and ecologically aggressive economic upgrading will exact an environmental toll. Corridors generally directly affect an area 50km wide along their entire length. The N3 corridor will, therefore, have an effect on about 30,000km².
Researchers say the huge trade corridors planned to crisscross Africa could cause irreparable harm to the natural wellbeing of millions of square kilometres without meeting much of their intended benefits. Researchers from James Cook University in Australia found only five candidates likely to substantially increase agricultural production without serious side effects out of 33 planned or existing sub-Saharan corridors.

Max Clarke, a partner at Environmental Resources Management in Johannesburg, says industrial corridors should be ways of confronting remote community marginalisation — not of making it worse. "Quite often, new corridor routes will loop around towns the road used to run through, removing a significant slice of the economy in the process," he says.
"Better planning could help boost the local economy by installing, for example, such service resources as petrol stations, truck stops, and restaurant and refreshment facilities.
"While a bypass would remove potential customers from the town, new service facilities would attract custom both from passing traffic and the townspeople.
"The environment would benefit by the removal of noxious emissions to a safer distance from the urban agglomeration," he says.
Industrial corridors serve their purpose best when strung with development zones or nodes that promote regional industrial opportunities such as agriculture and mining ventures with more efficient and affordable access to bigger markets.
"It will be interesting to know how industrial parks along the way will be incentivised and what would make sense to make them work," says Clark. "We already have some IDZs (industrial development zones) right next to major ports and they are battling."

Historically, towns in SA were spaced according to the distance a horse could travel in one day.
Following the discovery of mineral deposits and fertile agricultural land, and the introduction of modern transport, new urban settlement parameters were set. Corridors link these industrial areas and open new ones. The decisions to establish them are based purely on economic considerations. "The natural progression is for towns to be born and towns to die. That’s not great for the people living there and maybe that could be managed in a better way," says Clark.
"Corridors tend to be focused on the development at either end, but there is a major development opportunity for them to support economic development along the route, rather than creating ghost towns bypassed in the rush to get from A to B.

"This requires holistic thinking and detailed integrated planning to connect the needs of the communities and businesses along the route to the benefits the corridor has to offer.
"As land use patterns along a corridor change over time in response to different economic drivers, it is critical that the environment be prioritised and that ecosystems are protected. Failure to do this will ultimately reduce the options people have for development and their quality of life will suffer." Builders and navigators will wrangle with the issues wrought by new corridors and bring them into line, knowing that within a few years, new issues will arise and demand attention.
Half a century ago the road routes from Johannesburg to Durban carried mainly passenger cars and buses.

Today economics and rail freight shortcomings have dynamically re-engineered the route by funnelling cargoes onto the highway.
Road maintenance, repair and development can now hardly cope with the growth in tonnage. There are plans to widen parts of the N3.
The railways, meanwhile, lay largely idle along these busy freight corridors. State-owned railways authorities across the continent have been slow in finding answers.
To move the freight from the road back to the rail, there is a plan to spend R22bn on an integrated freight and logistics system to serve Durban and Johannesburg.
"We’ll be able to label (freight destined for) Johannesburg with a lot more confidence when the new infrastructure is in place," says Jimmy Sienh, a senior freight and logistics planner with a major mercantile line in Copenhagen.

The City Deep dry port has a container rail terminal.
For Transnet acting Group CE Siyabonga Gama the upgraded terminal is rail freight’s Trafalgar and road traffic’s Waterloo in the battle for Durban-Johannesburg freight. He says that "over the last couple of years, we have been growing the rail freight business at levels several times higher than economic growth rates. As a result, we can now offer our customers a vastly improved service — thanks to our reliable and efficient new equipment," he says.

The upgrade has replaced the container-handling equipment with new state-of-the-art equipment, rail-mounted gantries, reach stackers, container handlers and installation of a Navis terminal operating system, with the same platform as marine ports.
Transnet has invested R119bn in its rail, ports and pipelines infrastructure. The parastatal plans an infrastructure spend of R380bn over the next 10 years.

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