Bayhead ‘Superhighway’ on the cards

A plan to turn the muchmaligned Bayhead Road at the Port of Durban into a three lanes-each-way concrete “Superhighway” is in its formative stages, according to a knowledgeable source. The Bayhead Rd, the only access to all the southern port’s terminal complexes, has always been a slightly modified twoway bottleneck in the road transport industry. In its latest dual-carriageway format it has an inadequate asphalt bed, and has turned into a tyre-track embossed, pothole-strewn, suspensionwrecking mess. And this inadequate road surface, according to chats with those who are in the know, was very possibly done for the reason that the Transnet National Ports Authority (TNPA), the purse strings for the surfacing project for Bayhead, only invested sufficient monies for a quick-fix job – because they knew about this plan in advance. Also, any smartening-up of Bayhead would still leave the supply chain bottleneck at the Durban container terminal. Truckers complain in concert that the time through the terminal gate-in to gate-out is swift, but the pre-entry “A check” is the waiting game. And this waiting game is often accomplished with a kilometres-long queue building up along South Coast and the former Edwin Swales VC Drive highway into the port. Now the dreamed-of concrete surface of this superhighway would certainly prove a match for the volume (both now and projected) and the weights of the big-truck brigade that use it. But it costs a mint for concrete as opposed to asphalt, so we can’t confirm that yet. But this prompted FTW to try to pick the brains of Ivan Moonsamy, TNPA’s senior project manager. And he was more than prepared to talk, he told us on Wednesday of last week. But, he added, would we “kindly get approval” from the TNPA communications people before he could tell us all about the plan. But for this PR outfit, returning calls and adhering to deadlines is not their strong point, which is why we will have to wait until the next issue before all can be revealed. Of course, there was another issue raised by our roads people. “Bayhead Rd a superhighway. But what happens when it reaches the Old South Coast Rd/ Sydney Road end? Does it still get bottlenecked on the incoming route along the mostly two-lane, twisty South Coast, and does it still have the rather roundabout route to the main east-west N3 highway?” For the present, yes. But, as we carried in our summary of the Ethekwini Roads Engineering Department’s plans for the highway structure for Durban’s two-port future, there should be an answer to that, albeit in the future. But a Bayhead superhighway would certainly be one very welcome first step in the network in days to come.