The City of Cape Town has published a strategy to change the metro’s commuter behaviour and ease congestion on its strained roads.
The Travel Demand Management (TDM) strategy includes several techniques that work together to guide people’s movement by utilising existing capacity and infrastructure.
It also aims to promote more sustainable commuting choices rather than building new infrastructure, avoiding great expenditure to accommodate private vehicles.
Its objective is to change travel behaviour and habits to achieve a modal shift and better utilise the transport system’s capacity.
The city noted that the metro’s transport systems were developed to favour personal car transport, with roads and parking spaces created to meet travel demand.
This came at a cost to the users, which was well below the long-term environmental and economic cost of the transport system.
Demand soared in this low-cost, oversupply environment, as the same period saw a lack of investment in public transport capacity, resulting in an undersupply for travel in this mode.
Cape Town’s spatial development can also be characterised by highly segregated land uses, with development far apart, making non-motorised modes ineffective for the majority of trips and creating one-way traffic flow.
Included in the TDM strategy are several initiatives aimed at changing commuter behaviour to reduce personal vehicle usage in the city’s busiest areas.
These include employers adopting a Flexible Working Programme (FWP), with four primary models:
- Flexitime – Employees can adjust their start and end times within limits set by management.
- Staggered working hours – A fixed schedule where starting and ending times differ from standard business hours.
- Compressed work weeks – Compress a full week’s work hours into fewer than five days.
- Remote working – Allows employees to work from home or decentralised satellite offices outside of traffic-heavy areas.
Cape Town intends to set the example by adopting FWP and rolling out an area-based service management model to reduce the number of employees working in centralised areas.
Another strategy in the TDM is to prioritise high-occupancy vehicles (HOV), including ride-share, public transport, and carpools, by using dedicated highways, arterial and toll lanes, bus and minibus taxi lanes, queue-jumping lanes, and HOV priority.
The city’s third initiative is to expand park-and-ride at rail and bus rapid transit (BRT) stations to encourage motorists to use public transport.
The city also wants to replace free or discounted parking programmes with a cash-equivalent travel allowance instead, and is reviewing public parking tariffs to what it deems to be true commercial market values.
Cape Town has worse traffic than a city of 24 million people
Cape Town is considering a private parking levy modelled on international schemes, to charge property owners a municipal fee for each private employee parking bay they provide in the CBD.
One such city it can look to is Shanghai, China – a city with a population of 24 million, yet far less traffic than Cape Town.
It is one of the largest cities in the world with a population equivalent to just over one-third of all the people living in South Africa.
Despite its population, its public transport system ensures congestion is largely avoided, making it affordable and easy to commute across the city.
Of course, Shanghai is not immune to congestion, but vehicles flow in an orderly fashion as police officers are stationed at every major intersection at rush hour to prevent gridlock and ensure that central areas remain clear.
It must be noted that China’s road network is far larger than that of South Africa, and nearly every road is three or more lanes wide.
There are also separate lanes for buses, bicycles and motorbikes, creating an incentive for people to use these forms of transport to avoid the main congestion.
Large buses are also quite common in Shanghai, while private taxis are also popular – reducing the number of single-occupant vehicles on the road.
The city’s most valuable transport asset is its metro rail service, which runs along several major routes throughout the city.
Train cars are packed during peak hours, with people squeezing into every available spot, yet remain clean and well-maintained with no sign of decay or vandalism.
This service is also incredibly affordable, as the city has placed price caps on how much individual tickets cost, successfully reducing the number of commuters who need to use road networks to get to and from work.
In contrast, Cape Town is now considered one of the 10 most congested cities in the world, alongside metros like Istanbul, London, Mexico City, and Jakarta.
According to the INRIX Global Traffic Scorecard, Cape Town residents lose an average of 94 hours per year sitting in traffic, equivalent to nearly four days.
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