Road and rail need attention, but Transnet and the City have their hands full, writes Matthew Hattingh.
If container terminal inefficiencies are at the diseased heart of Durban’s logistical problems, then the road and rail links that serve the port are its sclerotic arteries. They are too few or too restrictive and fixing them will be a slow and expensive operation.
Lavern Moodley, chief civil engineer for transport planning with the eThekwini Transport Authority, said the need for a second access road to the container terminal was identified in 2014.
Bayhead Road, which was owned by Transnet, was repaired following the fl oods and was being widened and reconstructed, but it remained a bottleneck. The plan was to supplement it with a road that will link Langeberg Road (which enters the terminal) to the N2 highway, via the M7 Solomon Mahlangu (Edwin Swales VC) Drive, South Coast Road and Grimsby Road, where it passes the site of a proposed truck stop in Clairwood. The first leg of the new road would skirt the Amanzamnyama canals before joining Bluff Road.
Concept designs were completed for the municipality and Transnet in 2018. And the preliminary design, environmental impact assessment and modelling for the road have been put out to tender, but a legal challenge to the tender has delayed the process.
Moodley said the aim was to begin construction by 2026, but this was subject to securing funding in excess of R4,5-billion. Meanwhile, work was continuing on a project to widen and improve Solomon Mahlangu Drive, a vital freight link to the port.
The first phase, from the N2 to Wakesleigh Road, Bellair, was expected to be completed by 2024 at a cost of R40-million. Further work on the M7, as far as the Titren Road intersection near the Rossburgh testing grounds, would take two to three years and was dependent on a budget of R160-million.
New and wider port access roads would certainly help, but if the trucks funnelling down them in long queues were in the wrong order – too early or too late for loading or unloading – chaos ensued. The problem, said Moodley, lay in truck staging, or rather the lack of it. He said Transnet and the municipality had identified a number of sites, included one in an area bounded by South Coast and Eel roads, where a staging yard would be established.
When would this happen? “We want it to be done ASAP,” said Moodley, “it will help a lot.”
He was optimistic the first phase of the project, with staging for 200 trucks, would be operating “within two years”. The plan was to eventually accommodate 500 trucks at the yard, along with ablution facilities, a food court, clinic and a hotel, but first a number of hurdles had to be overcome, including transferring ownership of the land from one division of Transnet to another.
Apart from easing port congestion, the yard should mean fewer heavy trucks killing time (and crushing stormwater kerbs) on the suburban streets of south Durban.
The new staging yard would be supplemented by private truck stops and inter-modal logistics facilities under development in Cato Ridge and at the old Clairwood Racecourse.
The “dry port” at Cato Ridge – as it is punted by its private developers – has potential to ease congestion in the Port of Durban and fits well with distribution centres being opened by retailers in the area and Hammarsdale. However, Transnet’s role remained a sore point.
“We loved the concept. On paper it should work, but we couldn’t get things to work with Transnet on the rail side,” said a representative of an international freight-forwarding company, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Giel Coetzee, a director of MSC Logistics, sees growth potential for the company’s containerised export business but, at this stage, identified rail freight as the biggest constraining factor.
When KZN INVEST interviewed Coetzee, “abnormally high cable theft” on the Mooi River-Lions River stretch of Transnet Freight Rail’s Durban-Johannesburg container line had halted traffic. The line had only returned to full service about a month earlier, following the April floods, which caused an estimated R5-billion in damage to Transnet infrastructure. There was the backlog from the strike to consider too.
Coetzee said there were limits to what the roads could handle and “at this stage, rail is not what it should be”.
His concerns about rail were borne out by a Business Unity South Africa cargo briefing paper which in September said the continued reliance on road freight sounded “loud alarm for our road infrastructure and starkly highlights the rail system’s continued failure to play its part”.
The paper quoted Stats SA figures which showed sustained growth in road freight since Covid and a decline in rail freight, both in absolute and relative terms.
Business Unity South Africa noted the terms and conditions imposed on prospective operators by Transnet had discouraged the private sector from taking more of a stake in rail.
“We need a smooth functioning rail sector … until that happens, consequences such as road congestion, lengthy queuing times, increasing damage to our roads and increased lead times will continue to be the order of the day in our logistics network.
Transnet spokesperson Ayanda Shezi said the company would be in a better position to comment on bids once it had finalised its evaluation process. “The first phase of slot sales will provide key insights as inputs to the development of a robust rail reform regime,” said Shezi.
Whatever emerges, the different arms of Transnet will need to sort themselves out – and sharply. The state-owned enterprise holds an effective monopoly in some of its South African businesses, but competition is growing from privatised operation at ports in neighbouring countries, including Mozambique and Namibia.
The freight-forwarder quoted earlier said it “burned him” every time a client came to them to get help to take work to Maputo. “It really sucks. Maputo is tiny but it is efficient and getting bigger. We will wake up in 10 years’ time.”