Commuters heading to the southern suburbs on their way home from town on Tuesday afternoon experienced nightmarish traffic congestion, and travel times of more than an hour, due to a key set of traffic lights on the M3 being out of operation.
This morning, the same set of robots along the intersection of the M3, Rhodes Drive and Newlands Avenue are reportedly still not working roughly 19 hours after they first failed yesterday due to load shedding. The City of Cape Town tweeted that the department was working on the problem roughly three hours ago.
Traffic lights at Newlands Ave / Union Ave in Newlands are out. The department is currently attending to this.
— City of CT Alerts (@CityofCTAlerts) February 13, 2019
City of Cape Town traffic services spokesman Richard Coleman told TimesLIVE that pointsmen were doing their best to keep traffic moving, but traffic on the M3 was backed up for several kilometres between the CBD and Tokai on Wednesday.
Coleman said because the intersection was near several others controlled by traffic lights it was difficult to take control of the area manually.
His suspicion is that load shedding on Tuesday caused a circuit in the robots to trip, and said technicians would be attending to the issues today.
Picture: Unsplash