Peter Smulik, Rugby
Now that the City of Cape Town’s transport department has seemingly been able to “get over their hurdle” and decided to expand roads between the N7 and N1 by building a new road south of Plattekloof Road and make Plattekloof a dual carriage, to “bring relief to motorists”, how about bringing more relief to motorists by building a proper link road between Voortrekker Road/ N1 and the R27.
There are far too few cross-over points over the N1, and between Koeberg interchange and the N7 none, which worsens and exacerbates the congestion experienced at those two points.
A natural traffic cross-flow to relieve these two points would be to finally extend Sable Road properly across the N1 into Kensington and link it with 12th Avenue, as well as “straighten” and indeed widen it towards Boundary Road in the west to avoid this awful detour via Bosmansdam Road, where all traffic comes together.
That would require to chop a tiny piece off the Ysterplaat airfield in the north which, I’m sure they could afford to “lose”, but it would be a vast improvement to traffic flow between Voortrekker Road and the R27.
In particular, it would relieve traffic in and out of Montague Gardens at the Bosmansdam Road/ Montague Drive intersection, as well as the continually congested intersections around Koeberg Road/ N1 and Voortrekker Road. It’s high time that the City and Mayco member for transport Brett Herron do some real serious planning for future growth, as he puts it, as there has been precious little improvement to our road infrastructure over at least 30 years.
The patchwork here and there can hardly be expected to dent the dire situation we now have with grid-locked traffic on a daily basis.
