The R396-million, 80 km rehabilitation of the N1 highway between Pretoria and Bela-Bela is 80% complete.

The project should be wrapped up by the end of 2017, with R123-million to be spent next year, says Bakwena Platinum N1N4 CEO Graeme Blewitt.

The toll-road concessionaire says the rehabilitation effort will increase the design life of the road by ten years.

Bakwena is also fully rebuilding 167 km of single carriageway on the N4 between Rustenburg and the Lobatse border post between Botswana and South Africa.

The value of this project is R1.22-billion. Work has started and will be completed by mid-2018.

“This is quite a significant, invasive project,” says Blewitt.

Other upgrades on the 395 km of network under Bakwena’s control include the addition of 70 km of dual carriageway on the N4 between Pretoria and Rustenburg in a R1.5-billion project.

Bakwena has already added 35 km of dual carriageway on the N4.

Blewitt expects this project to be completed progressively from Pretoria “in the next four to five years”.

“It is quite a significant improvement that the current single carriageway will become a dual carriageway.”

Following assessments of aspects such as queue lengths and traffic capacity at toll plazas, Bakwena is also spending R230-million on selected plaza and interchange upgrades.

“We will add a sum total of 14 lanes along the route.”

The Zambezi toll plaza will receive an additional four lanes, and the Stormvoël plaza two lanes.

The Stormvoël interchange will also be upgraded.

Two additional lanes are being constructed at the Doornpoort plaza, the largest in South Africa at 40 000 transactions a day.

Pumulani plaza will be expanded by two additional lanes.

Construction on all these additional lanes will be completed by December 15, says Blewitt.

The Marikana and Brits plazas will each see the construction of two additional lanes in 2017.

Another major change at toll plazas is that Bakwena will have removed all manual-payment-only lanes in its network by January, so that every lane becomes e-tag-enabled.

Former manual-payment-only lanes may, for example, become combined e-tag- and manual-payment lanes.