Alex Dodd LANDMARKS
Cast your mind back awhile to a vacant lot just south of Joubert Park and the Johannesburg Art Gallery. For about 90 years this Union Grounds site was reserved for use by the military, creating a unique situation whereby four city blocks remained essentially vacant – on the surface anyway.
For a couple of decades this was also the location of a thriving underground parking garage. Named Jack Mincer, after a Johannesburg mayor, it once had space to park about 700 cars. But by the early Nineties the lower level was completely flooded, like some long-forgotten Atlantis.
Nobody walking down Plein Street would ever have guessed that there was anything underneath the dusty block of urban wasteland littered with car carcasses, trash and the general mayhem of taxis wending their way through the chaos of an uncontrolled African metropolis.
Although it was supposed to be a park, with its few bedraggled palm trees, the eroded surface level of Jack Mincer looked a whole lot more like Lebanon. It had all the negative elements Johannesburg businesses cited on their mass exodus northwards.
There was, however, one bold man who had no ears for the pied piper of Sandton’s seductive tune. Visionary property developer Lawrie Painting took one look at the site and saw in it a whacking piece of prime real estate in the heart of the city that is the gateway to South and Southern Africa. “Just looking at the site the obvious thing was taxis because there were taxis all over the site in any event,” says Painting.
On it he saw a huge formalised rank relocating thousands of taxis from the congested streets of Johannesburg into a proper off-street facility. Alongside it he saw a large convenience shopping centre, bound to do a roaring trade with the adjacent rank’s thousands of regular commuters.
In 1994 the Greater Johannesburg Transitional Metropolitan Council put the site out to proposal call. By 1997 Painting’s proposal had the go-ahead, with well-known construction giant Grinaker on his team. But perhaps even more importantly he had spoken to taxi associations and won them over to the idea of a clean, safe, efficient ranking facility managed by themselves. Who better to run the rank than those with the greatest interest in its upkeep?
Unlike the boorishly prescriptive inner- city planning of old, this project would seek to answer the specific, articulated needs of taxi drivers and commuters. Instead of being viewed as an indeterminate mass of volatile cowboys, the associations would be addressed as the honchos of one of the country’s most vital, multibillion-rand industries.
A far cry from old Nationalist thinking, the rank would be designed and built according to the associations’ real, stated priorities in the hope that they, in turn, would acknowledge ownership and responsibility. This they have done.
Prince Mokoena is Park Central management’s public relations officer and sits on the committee, alongside representatives from five other associations, in his capacity as an executive member of the Alexandra Taxi Association (ATA).
He’s got to be on his toes for rush hour. If there’s a problem it comes his way. The associations have been meeting every Tuesday for the past few years to reach this point where they’re operating as one body with their group interests at heart. Ten years ago this suggestion would have been seen as ludicrous joke.
Today, at a cost of about R20-million, Park Central is up and running – has been since February. Serving about 2 000 taxis ferrying around 180 000 people a day, the place is in many ways a new South African dream come true. It’s the first facility of its kind in the whole of South Africa.
It’s clean, it has functioning toilets at 20 cents a go, it provides shelter in lousy weather and it’s really safe. If there is a hint of a problem on the rank, it is reported to the queue marshalls from the associations who have no qualms in effectively dealing with the offender. Alternatively, it is reported at the office downstairs and taken up by the rank’s management committee.
With representatives from each of the six associations sitting on the committee, that’s a direct channel to disciplinary action. As a result the council hasn’t had a single report of violence or bad behaviour on the rank since it opened.
For commuters it’s a dream come true. The rank is an easy walk from Park Station and, once there, destinations are clearly labelled and queues monitored by the marshalls. The whole place functions formally like a station, reducing the hassle factor in getting from A to B.
The smooth functioning of the rank can be attributed to the ground-breaking constitution of the management team – a rare and effective public/private partnership. When Painting and the six associations were putting their management bid together, they recognised there was a missing element. They needed hands-on management clout – people who knew what they were doing when it came to the daily nitty-gritty of managing a building in the heart of the CBD.
Their answer was Citynet, a commercial property company run by two of the most dynamic young turks in the business, Nick Obel and Gary Graham. Together they manage a portfolio of about R100-million worth of property, more than half of which is in and around the Johannesburg CBD.
“When we launched Citynet we could either go straight for the Sandton-type market and go up against every property manager or broker. But we decided we’d go for the harder options in the CBD because other brokers were running away. We felt they were being shortsighted,” says Graham. “Instead of reinventing the wheel and relocating the CBD to office nodes in the north, our thinking is rather restore it. There doesn’t have to be a crime problem. It doesn’t have to go to rack and ruin. It can be very cheaply revitalised and made good.”
Getting involved in the management of the rank, with a view towards managing the already 150% oversubscribed shopping centre next door, was the next logical step for Citynet.
There are incentives for everyone involved in the rank. For the council it’s providing a much-needed public facility headache free. For the property guys there are the profits from the upcoming shopping centre to look forward to, and for the associations there are the benefits they’ll be receiving via the adjacent Shell petrol station due to open in December this year.
Of course the process has not been plain sailing, but stumbling blocks are seen by all involved, including the council, as precedent-setting lessons. The main problem has been the ineffective collection of rent from the drivers, which means the rank is currently in arrears with the council. Each driver is supposed to pay a fee of R30 per month. With 2 000 taxis to collect from, that’s no small job.
“Our method of collection was wrong and we’re currently exploring ways of correcting it. The best method would probably be for each driver to pay 50c per trip on entry,” says Obel. “But nobody has tested this kind of facility before. This is ground-breaking stuff and whatever ways are developed will probably be implemented in every facility of this kind to be built in South Africa.”
The two main thrusts of inner city renewal, explains Paul Arnott-Job of the council’s inner-city office, are to formalise the taxi system to ease the traffic congestion and to get hawkers into formal trading markets so the pavements are freed up for pedestrians and easier to monitor.
So Johannesburg does have a future and Park Central is just one piece in a giant jigsaw puzzle of visionary urban planning. Park Central is pivotal to the revitalisation of the whole Joubert Park area.
Explains Arnott-Job: “We’re working on upgrading the park. The whole of Joubert Park is a catalytic project that’s all happening now. And it all hinges around taxis and hawkers.”
According to Arnott-Job, the area should be redeveloped by the end of next year. Now that’s a far cry from Lebanon, if you ask me.