The government plans to cut rush-hour traffic around South Africa’s big cities by at least 20% over the next three years.
Speaking after a Transport Department media briefing at Parliament on Tuesday, Transport Director General Mpumi Mpofu said the key to achieving this is a reliable and safe public-transport system.
She also warned of future steps to discourage ”single-occupancy vehicles”, which make up a high proportion of the cars crawling through peak-hour traffic each day around Johannesburg and Cape Town.
”The challenge of single-occupancy vehicles in our major cities will continue unabated unless we introduce very stringent measures to ‘disincentivise’ the continued use of [them].
”The challenge that we currently face is that people … truly do not have a viable option but to drive single-occupancy vehicles. They find public transport in cities very unreliable and unsafe, and largely would not like to put their own lives at risk or inconvenience themselves by … taking that alternative.
”So, the most important thing about trying to encourage high-occupancy vehicles is to actually create a public-transport system that they can rely on,” she said.
Once this is in place, it can be followed by ”a whole set of disincentives so that we are pushing people constantly on to public transport”.
The department’s aim is ”to ensure that at least we are able to win 20% of the current car users over to public transport by 2010”.
Mpofu said the programme to implement a dedicated highway lane for high-occupancy vehicles — piloted on the N1 Ben Schoeman Highway in Gauteng last year — will be put into operation again in September. The system involves reserving the right-hand fast lane for vehicles with three or more occupants.
Asked when Cape Town will implement a similar system, she said authorities will look at doing so on the N2 highway into the city as soon as construction, currently under way, is completed. — Sapa