Guns and soldiers will not stop taxi violence, but proper public transport and careful regulation of the taxi industry might, argues Peter Marcuse
THE deadly competition among taxi services has a cause, and it has a cure. The cause is not that suddenly taxi owners, taxi drivers, or people in their employ, have turned into dangerous hooligans with no respect for life or the law; and the cure is not simply more police with yet more guns to prevent violence on the wrong side of the law by counter-violence on the right side. That treats the symptom, not the disease.
It is true, but not very useful, to say that the cause of the taxi violence is ultimately apartheid, which deliberately located African, Indian and Coloured townships far outside white urban areas, making long commutes to work a daily necessity for millions, and isolating them as well from shopping, health services, community facilities and good schools.
That’s why so many people rely on taxis every day; why taxis are such a lucrative business that people kill to get its benefits. But those spatial arrangements will take a long time to change, although changed they must
A more useful cause to focus on is the apartheid government’s transportation policies, which deliberately stopped subsidising (in the late 1970s) the commuting from the townships it created, stopped supporting public bus and train transportation, and instead permitted private “entrepreneurs” to do their thing, with virtually no real regulation and certainly no real planning. This was a means, among other things, of getting a few Africans to join (or think they had joined) the capitalist class, to support the existing arrangements because they were making money off it.
The cause of the taxi violence, in short, is that, having publicly created the need for mass transportation, the apartheid government then privatised a response that should have been a public one, and brought on the cut-throat (often literally) private competition whose results we see today.
The cure is to build up again publicly what should never have been privatised in the first place: mass transportation. Now, of course, it has to be done more sensitively than would have been necessary earlier, for many honest private persons depend on driving taxis (and servicing them, fueling them, sometimes owning them) for a living. Standard, widely-accepted planning principles suggest that where demand is sufficient along fixed routes at fixed times, public mass transit works well — trains where demand is heavy, buses where it is lighter. Where demand does not justify trains or buses, jitneys or taxis make a great deal of sense — but only as supplementary to mass transit, radiating out from collection points at transit stops. There, regulated (planned, licenced, inspected) individual or small enterprise taxis make sense. The whole must be planned, with trains, buses, taxis, integrated into a sensible comprehensive scheme. Often subsidies will be necessary and are desirable, because the alternative, vastly increased use of motor cars or uncontrolled private competition, results in even greater social costs (pollution, injuries, death) than the amount of the required subsidies — not to speak of issues of social justice in helping remedy the effects of past apartheid spatial policies.
That seems logical enough, but not so easy to do. There will, of course, be opposition. But from different sources, with different moral claims. Taxi company owners (often outside, well-to-do investors, with whites estimated at owning over 25 percent) should either be bought out, over time, perhaps with bonds repaid from proceeds of the businesses being bought, or should be hired and/or licenced to handle planned routes in an approved manner. Where associations of owners are competent, honest and reliable, they might be given franchises to handle assigned routes or areas as a group, thus continuing to be able to benefit from their own enterprise and ingenuity in improving service and revenues.
Taxi drivers, today often underpaid and exploited by taxi owners, should be hired as drivers and operators in the public system. Suppliers, mechanics, and others now servicing private taxis can equally well service public transit, probably with more stability in income and workload. The opposition to the old, segregated public services should not carry over into new, integrated ones.
Two big general lessons can be learned from all this. First, there are some public functions that should not be privatised, certainly not without careful consideration of the resulting public costs and benefits. Privatisation at all costs is a mistake, and money is not the only consideration. How many lives would have been saved had public transport not been privatised in South Africa?
Second, promoting private entrepreneurship, whether among those previously excluded or not, is no favour to anyone, if the public context in which such entrepreneurs must function does not permit them to make a decent and honest profit, but pushes them into the type of mafia business that taxi service has so commonly become here. There are thousands of honest and hard-working taxi drivers and millions of taxi riders in the new South Africa — they deserve better from the public sector than they have been getting.
When the Premier of the Eastern Cape threatens to “send in the troops”, he is avoiding coming to grips with the issue. When he talks of starting a government-run bus service in Transkei, he is meeting the issues head-on. Decent public transit shouldn’t be a last resort threat, but a first-line obligation.
Peter Marcuse is Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand