The Western Cape Provincial Legislature has been told that the highly anticipated plan to transfer management of the region’s railways has not been finalized.
The provincial government and the City of Cape Town have been embroiled in a long-running dialogue with the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (Prasa), which manages the country’s train network.
The city’s management wants to take over the management of the metro’s railroads with the aim of improving its public transport.
This has resulted in years of negotiations with Prasa as the latter works on a Service Level Plan for the devolution of the state-owned entity’s railways, allowing for municipalities to assume control of their local railways.
According to GroundUp, this Service Level Plan (SLP) has still not been completed, to the surprise of the Western Cape legislature.
Prasa’s Western Cape regional manager, Raymond Maseko, recently announced in a presentation to the Standing Committee on Mobility that the SLP was “not yet complete.”
The SLP is intended to mark the first step toward the devolution of passenger rail in the metro to the City in terms of the Land Transport Act of 2009.
Maseko stated that a meeting is scheduled for 29 May, which will allow them to complete the plan’s terms of reference so that it can be put into effect.
Back in December, Cape Town Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis announced that Prasa has signed the SLP “to improve Metrorail in the short-term”.
However, it was later revealed that City manager Lungelo Mbandazayo only signed the SLP on 21 February.
City mayoral committee member for Urban Mobility Rob Quintas then stated that “planning” was “underway” to implement it.
Cape Town has been calling for the prioritization of rail devolution since 2022, when Cabinet passed the White Paper on National Rail Policy.
It claims that a functional passenger rail service run by its own members would save lower-income households up to R932 million a year, sustain over 51,000 jobs, and contribute some R11 billion per annum to the city’s funding.
However, the government has dragged its feet on the issue for several years now, as the goal of a decentralized rail network has yet to be realized.
In 2023, Hill-Lewis threatened to declare an inter-governmental dispute, and the commuter activist organization #UniteBehind instituted legal action to compel the parties to sign an agreement.
Complicating matters is the fact that the national government is developing a National Rail Masterplan, which will include a framework to allow for the devolution of the country’s passenger railways.
This plan was meant to be completed in 2024, but the date has since been shifted to the end of 2025.
“Cabinet’s own National Rail Policy White Paper 2022 first promised the delivery of a Devolution Strategy by 2023. Then in Parliament on 5 September 2023, the President promised the strategy would be concluded and approved by 2024,” Hill-Lewis said in October 2024.
“We were very worried back in February at the President’s failure to even mention the devolution strategy in SONA, and now we hear of a new deadline of end-2025 for a ‘masterplan’. Given the track record to date and continuous delays, it is highly unlikely that the Rail Masterplan will be ready by the end of next year.”
We’re working on it
Maseko’s presentation highlighted how the Cape’s rail corridors collapsed during the Covid-19 pandemic, resulting in the shutdown of 117 out of 124 stations.
The lack of functioning trains also resulted in a new issue where thousands of people constructed informal homes on the railways, who needed to be relocated before operations could resume.
Speaking about the still-to-be-finalized SLP, Maseko said that the city would inform Prasa of how many people would need to be transported along different corridors.
Prasa will then use this information to provide support to meet the passenger targets.
Cape Town’s plan to assume control of its railways is part of an ongoing effort to reduce the city’s notorious traffic issues.
Earlier this year, it was revealed that the Mother City is one of the top 10 congested cities in the world, with motorists losing an average of 94 hours per year sitting in traffic.
In response, Cape Town has allocated R444 million towards congestion relief projects over the next three years.
This includes an expansion of the MyCiti bus network, and experimental efforts like reversible roads that flow with the traffic, depending on the time of day.
The train network is also meant to be a big part of this initiative, though the hurdles involved with transferring management from Prasa have significantly delayed this process.
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