Foretaste of Gautrain?
Alex Matthews over at the Liberal Revolution has some pictures and a writeup of chaos on Metrorail trains. He says it’s no wonder most people take taxis. The much-maligned minibus taxi industry has grown from nothing, in the impoverished townships, the moment it became legal for black people to operate passenger-carrying vehicles back in the 1980s. Seeing a need, private entrepreneurs grabbed the opportunity. It became a case study in unofficial black economic empowerment. Today, for all its warts, taxis are a cheap, efficient and ubiquitous industry that serves vast masses of mostly low-income commuters. It’s not surprising that government, for all its waffle about “service delivery”, couldn’t deliver such a thing.
Will Gautrain, the government rapid-rail link between Johannesburg, Rosebank, Sandton, O.R. Tambo Airport and Pretoria, be the same? Somehow, the anticipated R100 fare makes me think chaos on packed platforms is unlikely.
Thing is though, for all the talk it’s clear that the Gautrain has never been intended as a mass transit system. Its target marget is middle class car owners, in the hope that they’ll use the train rather than drive and thus some of the pressure on the N1 and traffic in the Sandton and Marlboro areas might be alleviated. In this sense, the higher ticket price serves both as a way to get more revenue out of a smaller traffic base as well as a deterrent to the masses who may make the target market feel unsafe (the Metrorail example is a perfect illustration). Now if the ANC tries to restyle the Gautrain as a mass transit system for everybody, with subsidised ticket prices, it will likely fail since it doesn’t serve the most important routes for anybody except the current target market.
The government has yet to come up with a mass transit system that competes effectively with taxis, instead they decided to embrace and regulate the industry. It was probably a wiser decision than trying to compete directly but the process has been a complete mess, compounded by the apparent inability of metropolitan police departments to enforce the numerous speeding, road, safety and road-worthiness laws that taxis so wantonly flout. In the case of taxis, enforcement is everything.
I hope the government doesn’t come up with a mass transit system that competes effectively with taxis. Some regulation, for safety and so on, isn’t a bad idea, but I agree that the biggest problem is simple law enforcement - both of traffic and vehicle licencing laws, and of the nasty tendency taxis have of shooting at (rather than competing with) rivals.
Agreed. Now the only trick is to figure out how to regulate the industry for safety without strangling it, stepping up enforcement and making taxi wars an unprofitable prospect. It wouldn’t be easy under normal circumstances, but with the current powers that be it might be altogether impossible.