February 3, 2003

THE City of Johannesburg is set to embark on a major drive to put up and repair lights on major roads and in streets of the suburbs, townships and informal settlements of the city.

Bringing light - two workers from City Power

This intervention will be made possible by a new policy adopted by council last week, to govern and standardise public lighting in the city.

The policy will see the city spending R24-million on streetlights in the current financial year, 60% of which will go towards maintenance and the rest will be used for installing new public lights. The policy compels City Power, the city's electricity utility to reserve 10% of its annual budget for public lighting. City Power has also established a division of 100 staff members dedicated to public lighting.

There are 143 000 streetlighting units in Joburg, mostly in established suburbs. Most townships and informal settlements were poorly serviced in the apartheid era and have never had street lights.

Until recently, the city's handling of public lights has been inconsistent and somewhat arbitrary. This was because of different approaches to public lighting followed by the various councils which were merged in 2 000 to form the Joburg unicity.

"The previous metros had different systems and designs and followed different approaches to street lighting, resulting in some parts of the city being better serviced than others," explained Brian Hlongwa, the councillor responsible for municipal services.

This inconsistency, according to Hlongwa, gave rise to maintenance problems. "It was difficult for us to keep spares. We realised that using one system would enable us to keep spares." The new policy therefore seeks to standardise the city's handling of public lighting and to guide City Power in its budgeting for and prioritising of the installation and maintenance of lights on the streets, roads and open spaces of the city.

To compound matters, electricity in many townships, including Soweto, is provided by Eskom, a company which has no obligation to provide street lights. City Power, however, is already busy installing new street lights in Soweto.

Public lights in the city have also fallen victim to vandals and thieves, costing the city millions of rands. The criminals sell the stolen copper wire to scrapyards.

A task team comprising Eskom, Transnet, Metrorail and City Power, has been set up to look at measures that can be taken to minimise cable theft.

Hlongwa expressed confidence that the backlog in public lighting will be brought under control in the next five years. The city will phase in street front lighting to replace high mast lights mainly in informal settlements. In future, only locally produced, environmentally sensible systems will be used. The technology to be used will also have to be cost-effective, environmentally-friendly and robust.

The city has launched a pilot project to search for efficient energy consumption. Currently, public lights consume electric load of 30 million volt amps per year in a geographic area of 72 x 38 kilometres. Hlongwa said the city is exploring ways of using the same load to cover a much wider area.

In future, the city's planning department will have to ensure that plans conform to the public lighting policy before they are approved. All developers, Government departments and roads agencies will have to conform to the policy, said Hlongwa.