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CONFUSION: ARE ENTRANCES LEGAL?
The great driveway debate ANDRÉ BAKKES
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No, you can’t walk on water ... The Meerendal wine estate was the battleground for South Africa’s biggest obstacle course racing series, the Warrior Race, this past weekend. Juan Booysen from Burgundy Estate looks ready to run as he hits the water after sliding down the waterslide. Participants pushed themselves to the limits as they battled slippery slopes, jumped off heights and ran and waded their way through various obstacles. PHOTO: CARINA ROUX
he “hybrid road” Gert van Rooyen Avenue now boasts four driveways, which are causing headaches for a local civil engineer and confuses authorities. In City jargon the reasonably busy avenue is technically a Class 4 road, but it was originally built to fall in the Class 3 category. According to the Western Cape’s Road Access Guidelines, driveways in a suburban environment may be built in a Class 4 road, but not in a Class 3 road. Therefore, according to the law, the driveway entrances along Gert van Rooyen Avenue are not unlawful. Civil engineer Stoney Steenkamp has a slightly different take on the matter, however. “I have been complaining with the local ward councillor and the district engineer since 2010 about illegal entrances in this road. They said they were concerned about the entrances and something will be done about it,” he explains. Years later, and some entrances were closed while others have been popping up. Each of the houses along this stretch of road has a primary entrance on the opposite side of the property, but some saw the opportunity to build a secondary entrance along Gert van Rooyen Avenue, be it for ease of access or for granny flats in their back garden. According to an email in 2010 from the district engineer to Steenkamp, it was explicitly indicated that no applications to build driveways in this road will be approved. Yet, driveways continue to proliferate, much to Steenkamp’s ire.
“One should practice what you preach. I’m also going to buy a property along that road and build a secondary entrance. What stops anyone living there from doing it?” he asks. As it turns out, legally there is no law prohibiting driveways along this road. Gert van Rooyen Avenue is a “local distributor”, which is described as residential through roads which distribute traffic within communities and link distributors and access roads. When it comes to the suburban environment, driveways are not allowed in district distributors, primary distributors and national and regional distributors (such as the N1). What makes Gert van Rooyen Avenue more unique than most roads is that it is a Class 4 road with a road reserve width typical of a Class 3 road. A reserve width (also known as a public right of way reserve), is the distance from one property boundary on the one side of the road to the other boundary on the other side. The reserve width in this road is 25 metres, and a Class 4 usually has a width of 16 to 20 metres. This irregularity is attributed to the fact that the city planners assumed that Gert van Rooyen Avenue will be busier than it is, but currently it falls snugly into the class 4 capacity of between 600 and 1 200 “car units” per hour. The question on Steenkamp’s lips remains: “If it is legal, why was I told no more applications will be considered?” . In a coincidental twist, Google street view images taken in November 2013 caught one labourer in the act of removing the curb along Gert van Rooyen Avenue to link the road with the secondary entrance of his employer.