The Sandton Central Management District said on Tuesday that it was continuing to work towards significant improvement to traffic signals and traffic flow in a bid to reduce traffic jams in Africa’s financial hub.

Numbeo’s 2016 Traffic Index revealed that South Africa was the fifth most traffic congested country in the world, with Johannesburg leading the pack as the most congested city in the country.

Numbeo is a crowd-sourced global database of reported consumer prices, perceived crime rates, quality of health care and other statistics.

The Sandton Central Management District said it was working in conjunction with the Johannesburg Metropolitan Police Department (JMPD) and Traffic Freeflow to improve traffic signals in the precinct.

According to the Johannesburg Road Agency (JRA), on average, roughly 50 of Johannesburg’s 2 135 intersections experience signal downtime each day because of ageing signal infrastructure and lack of secure electricity supply.

As a result, Sandton Central has sponsored six uninterrupted power supply (UPS) units for traffic signals at key intersections in its precinct to proactively address the electricity supply to traffic signals.

Recently, JRA engineers re-timed several intersections to start peak-hour flow timings half an hour earlier in the morning, running from 6am to 9am. Their peak afternoon plans now run longer too, from 3.30pm to 8pm.

City improvement district manager for Sandton Central, Elaine Jack, said they had invested in measures to ensure that key traffic signals in the district were always on.

“We have partnered with the JRA on a number of key initiatives, including a traffic signal forum where we actively engage with both the JRA and Eskom technicians in order to reduce the time traffic signals are down,” Jack said.

“We work closely with JRA management and traffic engineers to relook traffic signal timings to ensure the best traffic flows too.”

Jack said Sandton Central was also thrilled by the City of Johannesburg’s recent announcement that it would be allocating an additional R200-million over the next three years to improve traffic management, paying special focus to traffic lights, and the replacement of copper cabling at key intersections.

Jack said non-working traffic signals in a business district like Sandton Central could be detrimental in terms of lost time and economic productivity.