Cape Town makes central business

RESIDENTS and visitors to the Cape Town city centre will soon enjoy the benefits of seamlessly navigating through streets.The city will become more "user friendly" with signs displaying the numbers of buildings and correlating with the area’s Geographic Information System (GIS) map, city authorities said on Monday.

Cape Town’s CBD will be the first in South Africa to feature this international practice of including building numbers on the same signs as street names. The aim of the initiative is also to make the CBD more "parking guidance system".The project is a joint initiative between the city and the Central City Improvement District (CCID), which is a private-public partnership that provides complementary urban management services to part of the inner city.

Cape Town mayoral committee member for transport Brett Herron said on Monday that "the CCID invested in the preliminary research and reports required, which entailed walking each and every street in the CBD and identifying the direction of the street numbers, particularly as they pertained to every intersection".Mr Herron said the research team also had to overcome the challenge of allocating the sequence of numbers on the sign posts as these were not necessarily synchronised from one side of the road to the other.

Some work also went into understanding how to deal with the odd and even numbers on opposite sides of the road in order to make the project work.CCID chief operations officer Tasso Evangelinos said: "Users of the CBD will now enjoy faster location of venues and easier identification of destinations. Motorists will be able to decide which way to turn into a street to find their destination.

"This will save them time and fuel as they will no longer need to reroute or backtrack to the correct street. Companies such as couriers, online retailers, cabs and food delivery companies — the bulk of whose business includes matching addresses to street names — will also enjoy enhanced operational efficiency through the new numbering system."

Some of the streets in the CBD are already part of the sequenced numbering system, such as Bree Street, Loop Street and Long Street."There are more than 200 intersections in the city centre and many of the most prominent ones will be numbered by the time the project is completed next year," Mr Evangelinos said.

"We encourage building owners to prominently display their building numbers, as this will help to ensure that the street numbering system is even more effective for users of the CBD."The recent upgrade also includes the allocation of more than 130 motorcycle parking bays in the city centre — another need identified through the research.

Areas where high numbers of motorcycles parked in the CBD were identified, the motorcycles photographed and their locations plotted on GIS.At the time of the research, there were only 39 dedicated motorcycle parking guidance system, compared with more than 400 motorcycles accessing the CBD on a daily basis, the city said on Monday.

"The motorcycle parking bay project has also taken its inspiration from international best practice. World-class cities realise that people are becoming more conscious of their carbon footprint," Mr Herron said."More people are car-pooling, using the bus or opting for more fuel-efficient modes of transport such as motorcycles. We are now in a better position to cater for this need."

Also, 35 new parking bays were allocated to the disabled after research was conducted into international best practice on the ratio of parking bays for the disabled in city centres.The bays are easily accessible and strategically located near services and facilities such as museums, libraries, hospitals and medical practices, the city said.

A Durban company, which rakes in millions each year from its contract to run the city’s parking meter system, faces liquidation over a R26 million claim for rental fees.Joburg-based company EOH Security and Technologies has brought an application in the Durban High Court to have Emtateni Logistics, which lists Durban businessman Sifiso Zulu as a former director, liquidated.

Alternatively, the company is asking for an order placing Emtateni in provisional liquidation or ordering it to pay the R26m it owes plus interest.

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