/ 21 October 2016

Bringing BRT to the masses

On the move: Johannesburg's Rea Vaya BRT system is just one of a growing network of urban bus systems around the country.
On the move: Johannesburg's Rea Vaya BRT system is just one of a growing network of urban bus systems around the country.

Bus Rapid Transport (BRT) systems are transporting hundreds of thousands of commuters daily and the BRT Programme is the road-based component of the public transport strategy that is designed to move large numbers of people to all parts of a city quickly and safely, presenting a system that links different parts of a city into a network.

It is an ambitious objective, but government wants to ensure that by 2020, most city residents are no more than 500m away from a BRT station.

The BRTs include Johannesburg’s Rea Vaya, Tshwane’s A Re Yeng, My Citi Service in Cape Town, Rustenburg Rapid Transit and Go! in Durban. BRT systems combine rail with the flexibility and cost advantages of road-based transport, and have the added advantage of being easier and faster to build than a light rail transport system, which runs into multi-millions of rands.

Ultimately, the system will feature dedicated bus-only lanes, as well as bus stations that are expected to be safe, comfortable and protected from the weather. There has also been emphasis on special needs passengers such as children, the elderly and sight and hearing impaired, who have also been taken into consideration by Metrorail.

This is part of a public-private partnership in which cities build and maintain the infrastructure, stations, depots, control centres and a fare collection system. Private operators own and manage the buses, hire staff and provide services on long-term contracts.

Existing bus and taxi operators will feed into the public transport system, enter into long-term contract services and be paid per kilometre by the relevant municipality. Fares will be administrated using a smartcard system to ensure that commuters can afford them.

According to Vadi, sustainable mobility is going to mean confronting some “very serious matters”. Gauteng’s public and private transport are big contributors to emissions and Vadi says bold steps are being taken in this regard. “In the buses and the taxis, there are pilot projects with hybrid systems that are showing promise.”

The Rea Vaya buses, transporting an average of over 30 000 people to and from work daily, run on low-sulphur diesel and have the most advanced pollution-reduction equipment.

The Rea Vaya system is the largest ever climate change project the City of Johannesburg has undertaken and represents a major turning point in how the city deals with congestion, pollution and greenhouse gases. Environmental impact studies have been done in order to better understand the implications that a project of this nature will have with regard to emissions and the environment.

The operation of the Rea Vaya system through to 2020 has been estimated to save 1.6-million tonnes of CO2 equivalent emissions. It will dramatically improving Johannesburg’s air quality by taking thousands of energy-inefficient buses running on poor quality fuel off the streets and replacing them with hundreds of buses running on cleaner fuel with the most up-to-date pollution reduction equipment.

However, the bottom line according to Vadi is that there needs to be implementation and enforcement of emission control coupled to an effective public transport system, and the ability to integrate the old and the new may prove problematic.

Developing the roads of death

The Moloto Road is a thorn in the department of transport’s side, highlighting the difficulties some commuters still face. This particular 160km road runs through three provinces and carries over 150 000 daily commuters, but has claimed hundreds of lives of workers travelling on it to get to and from work in Tshwane from Mpumalanga and Limpopo.

For years there has been talk of both a major road upgrade and the installation of a railway line, both of which are multi-billion rand projects, surrounded by a sea of red tape and controversy. Recent announcements have said that both will go ahead, but these cannot happen soon enough and will not be short-term wins.

There is talk that it would be more economical instead of the road and railway to use this money to buy land and houses closer to Tshwane, as these are people who contribute immensely to the economy.

“They lead a terrible life, these commuters,” says Chris Britz, operations lead, civil infrastructure, AECOM. “They get up at 3am to get transport and get home after 6pm. They never see their kids in daylight and this not a quality way of life.

“As planners, I believe we must walk the cities. Walk the last mile getting access to public transport. At the core of the CBD of Tshwane, some 60 000 people walk between four and seven kilometres every day, tackling broken sidewalks and darkness.”

Britz says taxis have to some extent met the needs of these commuters, but the limitation is in the fee structure, which makes it unattractive to use this service.

Professor Christo Venter, associate professor at the department of civil engineering, University of Pretoria concurs, saying that this makes the eTicket a “great opportunity to start putting the carrots in place to help place taxis into an integrated system. Maybe we need to look at subsidies, such as in multiple transfer cases”.