Cape Town wants emptier roads – This is how it’s going to make it happen

Cape Town is one of the most congested cities in South Africa, with almost 90% of residents using the road network to get to work every day.

The metro wants to drastically reduce this number through sharpening up its public transport services and expanding them to previously underserved areas.

The city’s Urban Mobility Directorate recently held a panel discussion to mark the start of Transport Month this October, where it discussed its roadmap to quieter streets.

Public transport is the key

During the panel discussion, Cape Town management revealed its updated Comprehensive Integrated Transport Plan for 2024, detailing key points about the metro’s traffic situation.

As many as 89% of local commuters are road-based, as only 1% use passenger rail while another 10% simply walk to their destinations.

More than half of citizens (57.6%) use private cars while another 22.4% take minibus taxis, and 6.9% rely on a bus service.

According to city representatives, this distribution of commuters is unsustainable and expensive to maintain, both for the metro and for households.

The directorate noted that increasing road capacity is incredibly expensive and time-consuming, and it only provides temporary relief over the long term.

This is because building new roads available to all users incentivizes private car usage even further, and so it is only a matter of time before additional lanes and routes become just as clogged as the existing infrastructure, wrote CapeTownetc.

Rob Quintas, Cape Town’s Mayoral Committee Member for Urban Mobility, explained that the solution is to promote public transportation, but that it will be difficult to get people to make the transition.

‘The challenge is getting people onto public transport. This is our first strategy in combatting congestion,” he said.

“We need people on buses where the MyCiTi bus service operates with passenger rail as the backbone of public transport, as is the case elsewhere in the world. ”

Adding to this, Raymond Maseko, the Regional Manager of the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (Prasa), spoke about how a train could accommodate as many as 1,200 people, which could theoretically remove 1,200 single-occupant cars from the roads.

The city’s passenger rail service could ideally function at a rate of one train every 10 minutes, making a huge difference to congestion levels, reported the Cape Argus.

For reference, Prasa was running a train every 20 minutes along its southern corridor as of March 2024.

The agency has also been clamping down on cable theft, which is one of the biggest problems disrupting train operations not just in Cape Town, but across South Africa.

Another focus is Cape Town’s MyCiTi bus service, as the Mobility Directorate has several expansion projects in the works.

“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,” said Quintas.

This expansion will run through areas like Khayelitsha, Mitchell’s Plain, Wynberg, and Claremont and is expected to assist with the transport needs of the city’s economically disadvantaged communities.

Management is also investing in electric buses and avenues for non-motorized transport such as new cycle lanes.

One thing that Cape Town is not currently considering is a congestion tax, which is a system used in some of the busiest cities in the world like London and Singapore.

Congestion taxes typically impose a fee on private cars that enter the CBD at peak hours, thereby discouraging road users in favour of public transport.

However, such a system will not be employed in Cape Town until its public transport services are at a point where they are a reasonable alternative for commuters.

“We can only charge congestion tax when public transport is at its optimum,” said Quintas.

“Until such time as a fully integrated and comprehensive public transport system is in place, it will not be fair to penalise single occupancy vehicles.”