adminleave the road, according to elementary laws of physics, and if a driver does not know how to control a vehicle with a flat tyre, or is travelling too fast to do so, he will also leave the road.
Even the accidents involving hitting trucks badly parked at road verges will not be eliminated by dual carriageways, since there is no guarantee that the other lane will be free if a vehicle swerves to avoid an obstruction.
What a conversion to dual carriageways does do, though, is to ease congestion and allow a smoother flow of traffic.
So, with our limited budgets, we need to give priority to those sections of roads where congestion is intolerable, and the worst congestion is now found within urban areas, or in those highway sections that connect urban areas that feed off each other.
The Zimbabwe National Road Administration has in recent times upgraded the Harare-Norton highway, a segment of the Harare-Bulawayo road, as a dual carriageway, relieving intolerable pressure faced by residents of that satellite town.
Earlier the Government widened the appalling road linking Harare and Chitungwiza and in more recent times a secondary link, created by widening the first stretch of the Harare-Masvingo highway, was added.
Now the Harare-Mutare highway segment between Mabvuku and Ruwa is being widened; we do not know if Harare City Council, or Zinara, is responsible for the widening of the section between Msasa and Mabvuku, but we hope that this bit will be in place when the Mabvuku-Ruwa link is widened, so one of the worst stretches of road in the Greater Harare area is finally modernised.
Harare also needs to widen some highways within its own urban area: Churchill Avenue from the Newlands by-pass to Sam Nujoma Street Extension, the old
Bulawayo road (known by several names) that is so useful as an extra western corridor, Lomagundi Road as the north-west corridor, and Masotsha Ndhlovu Way in the south of the city.
Zinara and the city also need to look at Seke Road; this now probably needs a third lane in each direction plus some major roadworks as it enters the city centre or links up with Rotten Row and perhaps Enterprise Road South so that modern traffic densities can be carried and the main bottleneck removed.
But Zinara itself can use this piecemeal planning for its “dualisation” projects.
Traffic densities might not be high enough along the Chirundu-Harare-Bulawayo-Beitbridge and Harare-Masvingo-Beitbridge corridors. But sections of these highways could provide adequate tolls to support upgrading.
The section between Gweru and Kwekwe, or even Gweru and Kadoma, is one obvious candidate.
In fact, with all the urban sprawl between Gweru and Norton, we think that the combination of local and long-haul traffic makes the Harare-Bulawayo road a far better candidate for widening than the Harare-Masvingo highway.
Planners in the 1950s and 1960s thought so too.
Harare-Bulawayo was upgraded to its present level while the Harare-Masvingo road remained narrow tar, and even had sections of strip road, right up in the later 1960s.
Zinara might have to spend a little money on automatic vehicle monitoring.
This was done some decades ago when the then Roads Department would count the actual number of vehicles using a stretch of highway.
While Zinara could, in theory, use the data from its own tollgates, these are missing on some critical stretches that do probably need an upgrade first.
It is not much use building a very expensive road that cannot support the costs without intolerable tolls.
This is why it is so important to build the sections that are justified first, and then at the end of the project link these together.
This was the policy used several times in the past: the upgrade from gravel to strip, the upgrade from strip to narrow tar, and the upgrade from narrow tar to wide tar, which also involved a lot of realigning.
Online Reporter