The next time you are sitting in one of Johannesburg’s regular traffic jams, look around and imagine how much quicker it would be if one in every two vehicles was not there.
In the past five years, the number of cars on Gauteng’s roads has almost doubled. At the end of July this year Gauteng had almost three million registered vehicles, up from 1,6-million in 2000. With record new vehicle sales set to continue well into next year, the situation is unlikely to get any better in the immediate future.
The province currently has a car ownership rate of 214 cars per thousand people, yet 68% of Gauteng households do not own a single car.
Those without access to a car use public transport and, according to the Johannesburg municipality, 72% of public transport commuters use the 12 300 taxis that operate within the city.
In June, August and September this year, new vehicle sales in South Africa set record highs. The National Association of Automobile Manufacturers of South Africa is expecting 2005 to be a record year.
Econometrix economist Tony Twine says the increase in new car sales can be attributed to factors such as low interest rates, high levels of economic growth and the fact that ‘car prices have hardly moved since April 2003”.
Gauteng, the smallest province in South Africa, has seen a significant increase in new vehicle sales, with a 36% increase between 2000 and last year. It currently accounts for 38% of the country’s motorised vehicles.
Last year, 116 333 new cars were sold in Gauteng, while the eight months to the end of August this year has already seen 96 884 new cars sold. For the corresponding period only 3 876 vehicles were scrapped and removed from the roads.
The Gauteng minister for public transport, roads and works, Ignatius Jacobs, whose department launched the controversial Car Free Day on October 20, says they are well aware of the ‘major challenge” they are facing.
‘The way our road system was designed and the way urban planning took place, led to people moving further away from the city and in terms of road design it is biased towards motor vehicles. It is not pedestrian and public transport friendly,” says Jacobs.
According to the provincial government’s strategic agenda for transport, the freeway network is ‘already under considerable stress” and the high annual growth rate in traffic volumes is causing the situation to deteriorate rapidly. Demand forecasts included in the discussion document for 2010 indicate that the portion of the road network carrying 10 000 vehicles during peak hours will almost triple from 44km to 116km and that average travel speeds will be reduced by up to 25%.
‘Traffic volumes in the N1 corridor between Johannesburg and Tshwane have been growing at 7% per annum for more than a decade,” says the discussion document.
Jacobs says the Gautrain, a rapid rail network set to provide public transport over 80km of rail, linking Johannesburg to Tshwane and Sandton to the Johannesburg International airport, will be the backbone of the new public transport system, but it is only set for completion shortly before the 2010 Soccer World Cup.
The Democratic Alliance’s Gauteng spokesperson for transport, James Swart, calls the Gautrain development ‘premature”, and insists that the billions to be spent on the rapid rail link would be better spent on upgrading the metrorail system and building the proposed PWV9 highway between Johannesburg and Tshwane.
‘When we have grown our economy to 6% and we have built the road infrastructure, rail capacity and looked at taxi recapitalisation, then let’s look at building the Gautrain,” says Swart.
Swart says the emerging black middle class has led to more South Africans purchasing cars for the first time and moving away from public transport that is viewed as decaying and unsafe.
The statistics seem to support his argument — bus commuters in Johannesburg have fallen 40% since 1998 and the national travel survey reported that train users (42%), bus users (31%) and taxi users (48%) are dissatisfied with these services, with two-thirds complaining about safety issues.
The Gauteng government’s strategic agenda acknowledges the deterioration of the public transport service, owing to lack of investment and says the majority of users aspire to car ownership, which is unaffordable because of their low-incomes.
‘Public transport provision has been focused on the captive market, with little effort to attract middle and high-income users who can afford to operate cars,” the discussion document states.
The document says the objective is to integrate minibus-taxis and buses into a single network of road-based public transport, which would include a ticketing system to allow commuters to use their tickets across multiple modes of transport.
‘Every day, if we can win one more person to public transport, it is a victory,” says Jacobs. ‘We are not anti-car; we just want better flow of traffic.”