Heritage Cases

The proposed Quarry 6A will supply construction material for the proposed upgrading of national road R573-1 (K139) from Stormvoël Road in Tshwane (km 0,00) to the Gauteng / Mpumalanga Provincial Border (± 48.00 km). The rational for the proposed upgrade is provided below: • The R573 Moloto Road is one of South Africa’s busiest and most important economic routes connecting Gauteng, Mpumalanga, and Limpopo provinces with an extremely high number of buses and light motor vehicles. The road links small towns and rural settlements with Pretoria and carries inter-district traffic between these locations, hence the road is an important regional mobility function but has an equally significant accessibility function (KBK Engineers, 2020). • The road has been dubbed the “road of death” due to the high number of accidents that has happened on it over the years. According to the media release issued on the 31st July 2018 by Pretoria News, the Moloto road has not been upgraded for many years and has been exposed to increasing traffic over the years. Statistics taken from a period of 29 months, January 2012 to May 2014, show that there were 489 crashes on Moloto Road, resulting in 158 fatalities and 594 serious injuries (iol, 2018). • In order to address safety, mobility functions and ensure that reasonable access is provided to adjacent properties and areas to enable the future land use development, SANRAL is proposing the upgrade of the R573 Moloto Road. Large volumes of construction material would be required for the proposed project, hence the development of a local source of material would be highly beneficial. Obtaining the required quality and quantity of material from commercial sources would not be financially viable. Substantial cost savings would result by eliminating the cost of procurement and transportation of large volumes of material from existing commercial sources. Material investigations have also revealed that the proposed study area holds material reserves to meet the project requirements in conjunction with various other sites as provided in Section 2d (ii) of the report. In addition, the study area was previously mined for the purpose of road materials for the N1 and the proposed site falls within close proximity of the proposed road upgrades. Such will avoid potential risks associated with road safety on the surrounding road networks and carbon emissions as the distance travelled by the haul vehicles will be reduced