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Inner city disaster?
'A masterpiece of infrastructure and technology but an operational disaster' -- that is how Rea Vaya, Johannesburg's recently launched BRT system, is viewed by University of Johannesburg transport expert Vaughan Mostert in an interview with Road Ahead today.
According to Mostert, it should come as no surprise that Rea Vaya has had to cancel its inner city lanes. In the first instance, inner cities by their very nature don't really support that type of service. In fact, very few large cities do have inner city circular services for the simple reason that most people use the oldest form of transportation available: they walk.
Why go through the hassle of catching a bus to move a few blocks? A better idea would be to have long routes running from one end of the city to the other, like in London or New York, so that buses can stop in the middle of town but continue to other parts.
In the case of Rea Vaya, in an instance of what Mostert flatly asserts to be "massive incompetence", potential commuters were never clearly told how much tickets would cost and where they could buy them. Instead of a simple expedient like having tickets available at bus stations, commuters had to track down participating shops along the bus routes -- no easy feat in the chaos of inner city Jo'burg. One is left asking why, with an operational spend of over R1 billion, Rea Vaya never looked properly into this crucial issue.
Mostert points out that the amount of projected passengers was grossly overestimated. For example, 59 buses were projected for the main Soweto - Ellis Park route, with only 30 needed. Projections for the inner city routes varied between 1200 and 5000 and hour -- a far cry from the 200 odd total passengers that had got on buses before the routes were canned.
Ticketing is not the only problem. The BRT has not been merged with the Johannesburg metro bus system, Putco, or rail. Without truly integrated public transport, each leg stands to fail on its own, as though Raymond Ackerman's famous table were not attached to the table top.
Will the operational fiasco stop there? Will the Gautrain be spared this embarrassment? It might very well not be. For the Gautrain to have a chance to succeed, Mostert says, it must start and stop where people want to start and stop their journeys -- which currently is not the case.
Could it be that the problems bedevilling Gauteng's public transport initiatives are a classic example of the gap between the beautiful models' on the economists' computers and the context, the lived actuality, into which they must be inserted? Certainly it would not be the first time a project looked wonderful on paper but bombed in the real world. One can only hope -- with religious fervour -- that Rea Vaya learns from its mistakes with the utmost celerity.
Vaughan Mostert is facilitating a panel discussion on proposed government amendments to road freight axle loads at the Nepad Transport Summit on Thursday 27 November. http://www.nepadtransportsummit.org
