Mulol, Christian A2025-05-022025-05-022024-09http://hdl.handle.net/10204/14224Recent studies have alerted the South Africa Road Sector and its various stakeholders to the alarming deterioration rate of the road network condition. This is especially the case with the secondary and the tertiary road network where the backlog of maintenance is in the order of hundreds of billions of Rands. Amongst other reasons such as the lack of technical capacity within the secondary and tertiary road authorities, this backlog of maintenance has often been named as one of the major contributors to the poor rating of the lower ranking roads in South Africa. Roads within the secondary and tertiary sectors are either at risk of failure, being unable to cope with the normal demand, subjecting the public to severe inconvenience, or unfit for purpose, having already failed or being on the verge of failure, exposing the public to health and safety hazards. To ensure all the safety hazards on the road network are removed with immediate effect, preventive maintenance through the filling of potholes can be recommended. However, this approach was never intended to be the substitute for other maintenance or rehabilitation measures. This paper shows that though the preventive maintenance through the filling of potholes has a merit from a safety point of view, this method does not necessarily address the root-cause that led to the initiation and the generation of such potholes. Using various roads as case studies and through a comparison of their TMH 9 visual assessment strip map to the FWD deflection parameters mapping, this paper recommends that the reactive maintenance should not only follow the rigorous requirements of pothole repairs that extend into the base and underlying layers but should also be taken as a holding measure guaranteeing the safety of motorists until the appropriate rehabilitation or maintenance measure is implemented without further delay.FulltextenSouth Africa Road SectorRoad network deteriorationRoad rehabilitationConference PresentationN/A