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Agency to Upgrade Accident Prone Roads for 220m Br

The Addis Abeba City Road Traffic Management Agency is set to upgrade accident-prone roads by installing and maintaining traffic lights, safety devices, signage and marking at a cost of 220 million Br.
The installation of traffic lights will take place at 31 proposed road intersections. It will also include maintenance work that consist of repainting 50Km of lanes and zebras, and fixing road studs along 82 different streets. While the traffic lights will cost 54 million Br, the upgrades and maintenance work will take up 128 million Br.
Covering lane dividers and pedestrian crossings with new coats of paint will cost 39 million Br. The project is a continuation of a previous repainting project of around 100Km of roads.
The work will be completed by the end of November. A tender for repainting work on another 145Km of roads has been floated as a separate project.
Four contractors, ATS Engineering, Yared Seyoum General Contractor, Yemane Tewolde General Contractor and Bed Rock Construction were hired to complete the work. Yohannes Abbay Consulting Architects & Engineers will play supervisory roles.
The project will also include the installation of speed humps, rumble strips that were started in the last budget year but interrupted by the rainy seasons, and road studs.
Road studs, which illuminate the roads at night time and make sounds when vehicles pass over them, are made out of glass beads and light emitting diodes.
The glass beads are reflectors made from aluminium alloy with compression resistance of over 30tn while the diodes use solar energy to recharge themselves.
These road studs will be installed at 82 location where overpasses and underpasses start. Bollards, short and sturdy posts, will also be used to close access to vehicles on some of the roads.
“The Addis Abeba City Road Authority allows urgent maintenance and installation work as necessary and as environmental and other conditions permit, which is the case here,” according to Demelash Gebremariam, deputy director for Road Resource Administration of the Authority. “The agency has only to inform the authority by any means of communication the need or the urgency of the installation or maintenance.”
The Agency also plans to conduct awareness creation campaigns beginning this month in a bid to reduce livestock travelling on city’s roads, according to Genetu Dessalegn, director of the Agency.
Fekadu Gurmessa (PhD), a transport geography lecturer at Addis Abeba University for more than a decade, lauds the effort made by the Agency. But he believes that continuous maintenance is necessary to justify the cost involved.
“The traffic lights, paint coatings and other safety signage don’t have a long life,” he said.
Source-Fortune

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