With Cape Town ranked as having the worst traffic in the country, the issue of the city’s spatial geography where working-class people live on the periphery as they cannot afford to live close to the city where they work, has come under the spotlight.
The Global Traffic Index recently ranked Cape Town number one in South Africa – and ninth in the world – for the worst traffic.
Commuters face up to 83 hours of delay yearly while travelling to work in the city centre.
Globally, New York City reported the highest traffic delay times with 101 hours, London with 99 hours and Paris with 97 hours.
Closer to home, Cape Town is followed by Johannesburg with 55 hours and Pretoria with 52 hours.
GOOD Party secretary-general Brett Herron said Cape Town is an apartheid city and the most recent amendments proposed for the Municipal Planning By-Law will entrench the apartheid spatial legacy.
“The current form of the city resembles a city built and planned for under the Group Areas Act. If you look at the proposal for amending the Municipal Planning By-Law the new so-called ‘Affordable Rental Flats’ overlay zone replicates the apartheid map of the city. The areas where small-scale developers may build flats are those areas that were planned for the housing of people of colour under the Group Areas Act. Not only does this perpetuate the divided city but it will make the commuting crisis even worse. Those areas are already the most densely populated residential areas of our city.
“The commuting pattern – a tidal wave of traffic from these areas in the mornings and again a tidal wave back in the evening will just be made worse,” Herron said.
He added that the land released by the City for affordable housing lies dormant.
Zacharia Mashele of Ndifuna Ukwazi said that the organisation recently published a report “Land for people not for parking” which calls for parking lots to be used for housing.
The report also highlights that commuting from Khayelitsha to town for a person’s whole working life will cost them five years of their life stuck in traffic.
“The total size of vacant public land in the city is the same size as the city of Barcelona. We call on the City to release well-located land for housing,” Mashele said.
Nkosikhona Swaartbooi from Reclaim the City said if Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis was serious about undoing the apartheid spatial legacy, they needed to see more well-located public land, particularly in the inner city, used for its social good and not as a commodity.
“We cannot continue seeing the last remaining pieces of well-located public land being sold to the private sector or used for parking while facing a housing crisis. The City must realise that the only way to undo the legacy of apartheid spatial planning is to use ‘Land for People, Not for Profit’,” Swaartbooi said.
Acting Mayco Member for Human Settlements Siseko Mbandezi refuted claims that no social housing has been built in central Cape Town.
“The City has a plan to address spatial apartheid and has taken sufficient steps to do so. The City’s Maitland Mews development is already tenanted with over 200 families occupying social housing units mere minutes from the CBD.
We have also worked with the Province to enable 1 000 families to move into social rental units at the Conradie affordable housing development in the inner city feeder suburb of Pinelands,” Mbandezi said.
In June, the City further released its sixth inner-city property for social housing under the Land Release Priority programme. “The City has obtained a firm commitment from the National Minister in her quarterly meeting with all housing MMCs and MECs to instruct the Social Housing Regulatory Authority (SHRA) to engage the City (in) expediting the funding for our progressive pipeline,” Mbandezi said.
Referencing a statement earlier this year, the City said it was making good progress with the infrastructure needed for the roll-out of the MyCiTi service between Mitchells Plain and Khayelitsha and Wynberg and Claremont, and the major projects aimed at alleviating traffic congestion, among others.
Some congestion relief projects were in the final planning phases and others well under way including the completion of the Erica Drive road link between Belhar Drive and Nooiensfontein Road in Belhar and the dualling of Jip de Jager Road from Kommissaris Street to Van Riebeeckshof Road in Durbanville.
This also included upgrades to the M3 highway between Hospital Bend and Constantia Main Road, and the upgrade of Voortrekker Road to increase road capacity from the Salt River circle to Jakes Gerwel Drive in Maitland.
Cape Times