Landing the World Cup brought some difficult decisions for the South African National Roads Agency (SANRAL) when planning the Gauteng Freeway Improvement Project. Project manager Alex van Niekerk outlined these to John O’Hanlon.
Gauteng has experienced traffic growth of between five and seven per cent each year over the last decade and in the late 1990s was already congested enough to worry the South African National Roads Agency (SANRAL). After considering a range of third party solutions, it finally decided that the best way to solve the complex problems of traffic management around Johannesburg would be to carry out its own in-house study. “The key issue was financing such a huge capital project,” says project manager Alex van Niekerk. It would not be enough to treat it like a regular road improvement project: the solution had to be future-proof, allowing for and actively encouraging the expected growth of industry and commerce in Gauteng over the next 20 years and further.
It had to be done in a single project. “We didn’t want to have construction work going on in Gauteng because it impacts people’s lives. We needed a one-time intervention, with sustainable revenue to continue to upgrade the network and not fall behind again.” The entire GFIP scheme comprises 560 kilometres of new or upgraded freeway. The first phase, which will be completed next year, upgrades the ‘core’ network of 185 kilometres, linked to what is currently the largest road tolling project anywhere in the world.
The project was in the planning stage when the World Cup was announced in 2004. A decision had to be taken: “Do we start now or wait till after the World Cup? We knew that if we started as planned we’d be in the middle of a construction project, and we did not want to give the impression that South Africa couldn’t complete a highly visible project!”
It was decided that the project should go ahead but that certain ‘milestones’ should be embedded in the contracts, setting out the condition the road should be in by the time the World Cup started. “It added a lot of pressure,” he admits. “FIFA couldn’t be expected to move its dates to accommodate us, so we had to fast-track the design and tendering process. From sending out the tenders to awarding the contracts took only three months.”
SANRAL was concerned that the construction industry might not be prepared for such a large amount of work to come onto the market at one time. Contractors were required to prequalify, and during that process SANRAL encouraged them to form joint ventures with smaller partners. In December 2007 the bulk of the work, comprising 120 kilometres of Phase 1, was divided into two bundles, each divided into three work packages. Each of the six contractors that had prequalified were required to tender for all three work packages in one or other of the bundles. “That way we could be sure of getting competitive tenders on each work package,” explains van Niekerk.
Another challenge foreseen was the provision of temporary concrete barriers to separate traffic from ongoing work. If the contractors had rented them they would have faced a lead time of at least three months, so SANRAL placed a contract with Gauteng manufacturers for the manufacture of 10 kilometres of barriers for each of the six sections. This saved on the cost of transporting the heavy sections, and ensured that when the contractors were ready to start, they each had the barriers they needed for traffic accommodation. Similarly the permanent precast concrete barriers dividing the carriageways, and all the lighting masts and luminaires for the entire 185 kilometres, were procured by means of separate contracts by SANRAL and supplied to the contractors. “I believe it is very important to keep one step ahead,” van Niekerk says.
Normally on a road contract the client appoints the design consultant engineers, who appoint the surveyor and commission the traffic study but to save time SANRAL bulked together as much work as possible, and commissioned these as separate work packages in orderfor the design consulting engineers to have it at their fingertips when the design process commenced. To ensure design consistency and help achieve the milestones, the work was approached in clusters, with the geometric design, traffic engineering and pavement design leaders from each consulting engineer brought together to thrash out design principles with the appropriate member of the SANRAL project management team. This was a forum for quick decision-making, he says: “It was important to make a decision even if we did not always get it right first time.”
The contracts were awarded in May 2008, and construction started in June, just two years before the World Cup. Progress with the work was steady right up till the end of 2009, with nothing more than the odd redesign or change of plan when, for example, underground services were not in the place they should be. Since the contractors weren’t allowed to work on these services from third party service providers, progress would then be delayed by the ability of the service provider to move their utility. Nevertheless the milestones were met.
Then the weather turned nasty. “Between January and May 2010 we had between two and three times the normal rainfall and that posed the biggest challenge to the milestones. Most of the work is weather dependent and you get to a point where the ground is so saturated that even a little bit of rain causes everything to be delayed.”
Van Niekerk takes his hard hat off to the contractors who worked nights and weekends to catch up. His team contributed by rescheduling so that work could go on at different locations and allowing more lane closures in off-peak hours (though the contractual commitment to avoid any lane closure at peak times was never broken).
The contractors had until the end of May, with an emergency buffer of one week after that. The end result was that the milestones were mostly reached on target, some improved upon. “The sites were made clean and neat, the road markings in place, the additional capacity was there, and for the residents of Gauteng it was a traffic holiday. People were reporting anything from 30 to 90 minutes shorter journey times. It is a demonstration of what the job will mean economically, as well as good for the World Cup,” says van Niekerk.
The event was held; Spain took home the cup—end of story? Not quite. “For the duration of the World Cup we stopped construction for a little over a month, then the contractors returned to do the final part of the Phase 1 work. Most of those contracts will be substantially completed by the end of this year or early 2011.”
The next challenge is to implement the electronic tolling system. Forty-two toll gantries and 15 customer care buildings were incorporated in the civil works, and the $155 million contract for the design and installation of the system was awarded to Electronic Toll Collection Pty Ltd (ETC), a joint venture of the Austrian firm Kapsch and local firm Traffic Management Technology. The system will go live by the middle of next year. ETC was also awarded to contract for the operations of the system, for eight years.
GFIP has given a boost to the South African construction industry, van Niekerk believes. It gave opportunities to young engineers to tackle things they don’t often encounter, like the interchange upgrades and long incremental launch bridges. “The joint ventures brought in smaller companies that obtained a lot of knowledge and training for their personnel, upgrading their CIDB ratings.” Some of those companies ended up joining their lead JV partner, he adds. “It reshuffled and grew the industry. The experience will provide us with more competent companies that can tender on future projects, and SANRAL learned a lot from rolling out a complex project like this as well.” www.nra.co.za
