urban management Archives - Page 2 of 2

Our Speeding Awareness Initiative – No Need to Speed

It’s no mystery that for many of us, a work commute is an unavoidable and chaotic part of our lives. Shockingly, 1 third of all deaths on our roads are caused by motor pedestrian collisions at speed. Closely followed by passenger deaths, making up 32% of road fatalities. This leaves countless families shattered simply because drivers were in a rush. Our speeding initiative shares our top insights on how to curb speeding in your area.

Tygervalley Improvement District – Collaborating with the City of Cape Town

A common occurrence we see daily in the Tygervalley Improvement District (TVID) is this. Imagine there is a truck or a visitor is pulling into an opposite bay, and you are a driver speeding. You overtake the truck quickly but don’t see the pedestrians walking in front of the vehicle. Leaving you with 0 reaction time to brake.

This causes a potentially fatal collision for the pedestrian. Derails the driver’s life who is liable to criminal charges. Costs the business cleaning up the accident dearly. Most importantly, it is incalculably devastating to the passengers, drivers, and pedestrians’ families.

The solution to stopping speeding? Simple, slow down.

Every morning and afternoon, thousands of dedicated employees make their journey to work by foot, taxi, bus, and car. Here is the good news – we have a simple solution. Simply slow down, pay attention and obey our speeding laws and safer South African streets are just around the corner.

As the Tygervalley Improvement District, we are helping to stop speeding by:

Making sure all traffic and speeding signs are clearly visible and in good condition.
Continuing to develop creative ways of implementing sustainable road safety strategies. We are also working together with the TVID population to adjust these programmes to your specific needs.
Collaborating with the City of Cape Town to implement and maintain traffic speed enforcement measures. These include cameras, speed management obstructions and traffic officers patrolling the greater TVID area.

Tygervalley Improvement District – Implementing sustainable anti-flooding road safety strategies

As a driver, you can help us curb speeding by:

Slowing down. In industrial areas, the National Road Traffic Act states that drivers should not exceed 60 km/h. This ensures that you have sufficient time to react to unforeseen situations and will avoid unnecessary fines.
Remaining aware and vigilant. Keep your eyes on the people, other drivers, and potential obstructions in your line of sight and off your cell phone.
Being aware that the TVID is an industrial area and likely to have pockets of congestion throughout the day. Be mindful to allow yourself more time to get where you are going.
Being patient. We have many slow-moving vehicles carrying remarkably heavy loads that are too large to manoeuvre quickly so don’t pass when it is not 100% safe.
Our streets are lined with driveways, side streets and loading bays that trucks need to turn into. Please do not park in any of these zones, as this will lead to a traffic jam until you are found and move your car out the way to safety.
Maintaining a safe following distance. If you are unsure of what this is for the different vehicle types, watch this excellent video guide on “The Time Distance Ratio” by Arrive Alive.

As a business owner, you can:

Create parking zones for clients and 3rd party suppliers. This will prevent them from needing to slow down and to park either in an open employee bay or illegally on the opposite side of the road.
Respect the boundary markings of roads. Red lines, pavements, pedestrian walkways, and cyclist paths are carefully calculated to keep the flow of people into the area safe and swift. Please do not park vehicles in these designated areas.
Make provisions for pedestrians so your employees and the employees of the businesses around you are not forced to endanger themselves by walking on the road.
All your employees who come to work in their own vehicles should be educated on the dangers of speeding and carpool where they can to save on parking space.
Ensure that all employees who need parking bays are provided with a place to put their vehicles. The best time to make these alterations would be during a Facade Improvement intervention.
If you are a fleet manager – have multiple company cars or have an internal employee transport system – introduce a telematics system. This will allow you to target your speeding awareness interventions to the drivers who need them.

According to the Road Traffic Management Corporation (RTMC), traffic accidents cost our already strained South African economy a whopping R176 Billion in 2020. We also missed the target set out in the UN decade for action road safety amendment by miles, despite a months-long lockdown that restricted movement.

Traffic Enforcement

Traffic enforcement is a last resort for the TVID. While we would prefer not to implement these measures, we are charged with the duty of making the Tygervalley Improvement District safer for all. Traffic enforcement to curb speeding vehicles will be a necessary consequence if we all don’t slow down.

In a time where so many of us are only just scraping by financially, we simply shouldn’t waste money paying expensive traffic fines for speeding incidents that are 100% easily avoidable.

We truly believe that together we can make the roads of the Tygervalley Improvement District (TVID) a safer space for our community and would love to hear your #GoodNews and suggestions, simply mail us at info@tvid.co.za.

If you have any safety concerns to report, please contact one of the following numbers:

SAPS (South African Police Services) – 10111
City of Cape Town Disaster Management. – 107
Geocentric Control Room – 021 565 0900

August 3, 2021/by tvidcoza

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TVID Takes Matters in Hand

Tygervalley can be assured of a dedicated and comprehensive service being rendered by the TVID (Tygervalley Improvement District), as can be concluded from a report on activities in the area during the past few weeks.

On the Public Safety front there was a large amount of activity that can set the area’s tenants and residents at peace.

TVID Urban Safety Team

The public safety officers regularly patrolled within the TVID to secure the safety of the businesses and

the public. Some of the responsibilities executed, were the following:

Engaging with all people in the public space to ensure that everyone is aware of our presence and activities. This is done in conjunction with and in support of law enforcement who oversees such activities. If something suspicious is found, Law Enforcement Officer and or SAPS acts accordingly

Most of the security activities involving engagement with the public, appear in Havenga Street, Durban Road, Willie Van Schoor Street, Edward Street and Carl Cronje Street.

According to TVID Manager Clifford Oostendorp, the reason for this is that beggars, bin scratchers and car guards moving from Bellville to Durbanville or from Durbanville to Bellville pass through the Tygervalley area.

Examples of engaging with the public are the following:

TVID Public Safety Officers engaged with a suspicious-looking man who was in possession of a “tik lolly” on the corner of Oakdale Street and Durban Road. Officers confiscated the item, gave him a warning and removed him out of the area.

On Durban Road officers engaged with a person who had in his possession an undisclosed amount of City of Cape Town blue refuse bags. Our officers confiscated the bags and removed him out of the area.

On 25 October 2017, Public Safety Officers engaged with intoxicated vagrants who were loitering in public in front of Virgin Active, Sportica Road. The persons were cautioned. (See photos)

Officers also engaged with suspicious-looking men who were in possession of knives on Carl Cronje Street. (photos)

Persons begging for money at Edward Street, Willie Van Schoor Street, Durban Road and Bill Bezuidenhout Street respectively, were cautioned

Various suspicious-looking persons were stopped and searched in Edward Street.

On Edward Street, public safety officers engaged with illegal car guards.
People scratching in bins at Misspell Street, Durban Road and Sportica Street respectively, were cautioned and requested to leave the area. (photos)

February 22, 2018/by tvidcoza

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Geocentric Launches New App

“As Geocentric we are very proud to launch our new mobile phone reporting application,” said Gene Lohrentz of the urban management company recently. “This is another way in which we are enabling our CID business and property owners to interact with their City Improvement District Management.

“We want our CID contributors to become part of our family by interacting with us about issues they might encounter.  The mobile application makes that possible on the devices most people have with them every day.”

The Geocentric app allows users to easily report issues in the City Improvement Districts managed by Geocentric Urban Management based in South Africa.  Currently the areas covered by this Application include Beaconvale Industrial Area, Elsies River Industrial, Glosderry, Maitland, Salt River, Somerset West CBD, Stikland Industrial, Strand CBD and the Tygervalley CBD. 

With this application users can report urban defects, crime incidents, public safety issues and general comments.  “We will acknowledge your report and provide you with feedback throughout the process.  We will also send you ‘Alerts’ of problems in your CID area, such as water leaks or power outages and we can even send crime alerts and safety tips to your mobile phone.

The Geocentric Reporting Application is Free of Charge

Simply install it and register as a user when using it for the first time.  If you need any help, please contact support@geocentric.co.za

Let’s get started!

Simply download and install the App from the Google Play or Apple App Store
Register as a user, using the app when you open it for the first time

We will send you a confirmation email and you will have to activate your app by clicking on the activation link in the email – this is to ensure we are dealing with people and not spammers.
Go to your email and verify your email address
Log in and you are ready to go!

February 21, 2018/by tvidcoza

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Urban Management Trolley Introduced

The Geocentric Urban Management Trolley Project was initiated in 2017.

The aim of the project is to provide urban cleaning and maintenance teams with a platform to improve their daily tasks, assist with moving of equipment and tools and enable recycling while performing their tasks.

A few design considerations were introduced into the design of the trolley including

The ability to move heavy loads of litter or recycling from one point to another without effort or potential injury
Create high visibility for the cleaning and maintenance teams
Have quick and easy access to tools and equipment
The ability, even when fully loaded, to easy ascend and descend kerbs and sidewalks
Be able to separate waste as they work to support the recycling initiative

To achieve some of these design principles, Geocentric looked at simple solutions from other designs, for example, the stair-climbing suitcases used by so many travellers. By scaling up the design for the urban management trolleys, we could produce a sidewalk and pavement climbing trolley where the urban management worker needs minimum effort to get onto and off pavements to perform their duties.

(See photos of step 1, 2 and 3 illustrating this concept.)

The trolleys were also designed to be pushed from any side with key tools located in the middle so that it is in fact easy to use it for a two-man team operation. On each side of the trolley a plastic tool box allows storage for small tools.

Recyclables like tin cans, glass and plastic bottles are collected by the urban management workers throughout the day as they clean the streets and public spaces and at the end of each day they separate the items into baskets whereafter Geocentric recycles the items.

This is another way in which we make CID operations more sustainable and environmentally friendly as we prevent a vast amount of waste from simply going to landfills.

Geocentric have rolled out these trollies in the Elsies River and Beaconvale City Improvement Districts and plan to roll them out to all the other CIDs under Geocentric management through the course of 2018.

February 21, 2018/by tvidcoza

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Cleaning Team Multitasks

The task of the TVID’s maintenance and cleaning team is to clean within the TVID in order to sustain a fresh environment. The following duties were recently completed within the TVID:

Cutting of grass and de-weeding at Havenga Street, Misspell Street and Durban Road respectively.

See ‘Before’, ‘During’ and ‘After’ pictures to illustrate:

BEFORE

DURING

AFTER

TVID Cleaning and Maintenance Team was deployed to empty green bins in our area.

The Cleaning and Maintenance Team was also deployed to clear and remove illegal dumping in the TVID area. (See ‘Before’, ‘During’ and ‘After’ pictures.)

BEFORE

DURING

AFTER

The team also re-aligned and painted bollards and street signs at Durban Road, Edward Street, Willie Van Schoor Street and Antrum Park respectively.

February 21, 2018/by tvidcoza

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Urban Renewal On-going

TVID’s Urban Renewal team has back to back responsibilities relating to the maintenance and beautification of the area, when necessary in collaboration with teams of the City of Cape Town.