Road Maintenance

The construction of roads in Addis Ababa began right after the inception of the city. Many roads of the city were constructed long ago and served for prolonged time.  Because of this, these roads get damaged often.   Undesired acts also add to the damage. Lack of emphasis on road maintenance during the years worsens the problem.

 Highly damaged roads are observed hindering vehicles and pedestrian’s mobility, raising vehicles operating costs, and aggravating accidents eventually impacting the socio economic development of the city as well. 

As regular road condition assessment and maintenance is vital the authority is now committing much effort and investment. The condition of most of the roads in the city has improved a lot as a result of the due emphasis maintenance received from the city administration since 2016. Hundreds of millions were spent on road maintenance for the first time. This coupled with the commitment from AACRA’s management and employees to improve the city’s roads boosted the road maintenance coverage. JAICA’s support in RMMS also played its own part in improving the quality of work. The authority’s engineers’ professional capacity was developed as a result of trainings and technical support from the agency.

Basically AACRA maintains asphalt roads, pedestrian walk ways, cobblestone roads, roundabouts, drainages and curve stones. However the scope of maintenance has increased both in quantity and variety since 2016. Previously maintenance mainly focused on asphalt carriage ways. But currently road maintenance has taken more holistic form that apart from patching the carriage way other road infrastructures like walkway, drainage and curbstone are being maintained. During September 2016- March 2018 around 250 k.m. asphalt road was maintained. Compared with the authority’s previous annual maintenance capacity which was 30 km on average, this performance could be taken as a great leap to the authority’s road maintenance capacity

So to decrease the unwanted impacts of damaged roads and residents to have safe roads, regular road assessment and maintenance is vital. 

The road maintenance work is mostly being carried out at night and on weekends purposely in order not to constrain traffic flow on week days. Due to this and due to the improvement on the city roads exhibited the authority is being praised by dwellers of Addis.

5.3 Drainage

The authority provides drainage system that consists of the roadways and its curbs which stand as the first gathering point of the storm water. Grid inlets provided on the roadways are designed to sweep away water from the road. These inlets are connected to the underground pipe network and culverts which take the flow into nearby rivers. The Authority manages …km drainage line on both sides of the road as of July 2018.

5.4 Bridge

Building bridges in various places is a critical strategy for the authority’s effort to connect neighborhoods, to enable interchangeable flow and to manage topography. Small bridges built over small water bodies in various neighborhoods of the city have served great deal in enhancing connectivity thereby promoting social and economic interactions.

Aiming to reduce traffic accidents and congestion, AACRA started to build pedestrian over pass bridges in other areas of the city. Two of the first such bridges outside of the ring road were built at Arat Kilo and AradaGiorgis areas. Other such pedestrian over pass bridges had already been constructed on the ring road to free the high ways from pedestrian crossings.

Shegole Bridge is the longest and the highest bridge built by AACRA. Currently AACRA manages around 285 bridges in the city. 

5.5 Street Lights

Currently AACRA has already started replacing the old sodium street lamps with modern LED street lamps.

The authority had also made some efforts to implement the total energy solutions Green Economy development approaches by using renewable energy solutions projects for street lights.