Cape Town - With more than half of Cape Town’s daily commuters using private vehicles to get to work and school, the City says it wants to increase the reliability of various public transport options.
In the City’s latest Comprehensive Integrated Transport Plan (CITP) 2024: 1,3% of commuters use passenger rail, 10% walk and the rest rely on private vehicles (57,5%), bus (6,9%) and minibus-taxis (22,4%).
The City said the current uptake of passenger rail was even less than metered taxis and e-hailing services at 2.2%. Currently, 89% of commuter trips in Cape Town are road-based, with the City referring to this as unsustainable.
Expanding road capacity would be expensive and time-consuming, providing short-term relief as new roads and lanes would attract more private vehicles.
Commencing Transport Month, the City’s Urban Mobility Directorate held a panel discussion around this “congestion conundrum”, at the Cape Town Civic Centre, yesterday.
The City said there was an overreliance on road-based transport in Cape Town, as commuters have been moving away from the passenger rail to the road network since 2012.
PRASA regional manager Raymond Maseko said: “The panel was focusing on how do we beat congestion for Capetonians. I'm saying to the panel and I’m saying to Capetonians, if you have single occupant vehicles, 1 200 of them, there’s 1 200 vehicles, think about that congestion.
“I can take all of those people and put them in one train. So the solution is, Prasa has been in its rebuilding programme in order for us to at least get the trains back post-Covid-19.
Now, the way we believe we can play a role is that we can run a train every 10 minutes. If we get to that standard of running a train every 10 minutes in all of our corridors, I believe that we will see less congestion on the roads.”
“Then we are also working on journey times. Improving our speeds on different corridors because we have the new trains now that are able to stop at a moment's notice. The older trains, you can’t blame them, they were top for the generation of 1957 and 1960, they were the top technology of the time.”
“At the moment, Prasa was running a train every 20 minutes on the southern corridor as of March 4, 2024 and had also clamped down, significantly, on cable theft.”
Mayco member for Urban Mobility Rob Quintas said: “Our commitment to getting more people to use public transport is by undertaking one of the largest infrastructure projects South Africa has seen in a very long time and that is the phase 2A or South East corridor expansion of the MyCiTi network.
“So that is a project that is going to basically address many of the transport needs of our most densely populated and socially economically disadvantaged section of the City.”
Quintas said the City was not just focusing on public transport but investing “heavily” in non-motorised transport corridors such as cycle lanes.
The City’s Urban Mobility Directorate Director: Transport, Planning & Network Management Neil Slingers said: “When it comes to congestion, Cape Town has a funny sort of make-up, in that we have very wealthy people and we have very poor people. The very poor people are incredibly captive to public transport and the very wealthy people choose not to use public transport. So for them it’s a choice.
“But when we look at providing road space, looking at providing better road infrastructure, there would be an element, of is it correct to spend hundreds of millions of rands to ensure that somebody that travels and uses a private vehicle to get to where they want to, is it morally correct to do so versus investing and making sure that public transport is prioritised to a point where we can get everybody to use public transport, so it’s about shifting, getting everybody out of their private vehicle, and that’s not only getting them out but also better utility of the private vehicle. Three people or four people per car.”