Paper presented at the 33rd Annual Southern African Transport Conference 7-10 July 2014 "Leading Transport into the Future", CSIR International Convention Centre, Pretoria, South Africa.
The first Freeway Management System (FMS) was launched as a pilot along the Ben
Schoeman Freeway in Gauteng during 2007/2008. Since, then complete systems were
rolled out in the larger Gauteng Area, the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal for the 2010
Soccer World Cup. These systems are currently being expanded in all three these areas to
cover nearly 500 kilometres of freeways and which are controlled from three state-of-theart
control centres in Midrand, Cape Town and Pietermaritzburg.
In general, FMS offers various benefits, amongst others real-time information to the public
for real-time route choices but it also offers faster detection times of incidents that should
result in faster responses to the scene and better management of the scene. This paper
explores the benefits of the FMS’s specifically in terms of what has happened to incident
response and clearance times over the past 3,5 years. The focus is specifically on the
performance of the Western Cape FMS. The system has been in place since May 2010,
i.e. for nearly four years. Data was collected throughout this period and these are used to
investigate operational trends.
From the available data, it is evident that response times have reduced with at least 67%
over the past three years. This applies to all responding services in the Western Cape.
Clearance times of incidents involving fatalities have also reduced significantly from more
than four hours to around 2, 5 hours. However, lately there has been an increasing trend
which needs to be management carefully.
