Straddling Alexandra township and suburban Wynberg, the Pan Africa Mall area is home to a near spotless three-storey taxi rank, a shopping mall and hordes of traders totally unbothered by highveld thunderstorms. It boasts sweeping views of the Sandton skyline and, according to savvy shoppers such as Felicia Mogano, offers cheaper and choicer cuts of beef than anything she finds at Woolworths.
Mogano — an HR administrator and seasoned taxi rider — climbs every weekday into a 16-seater bound for Joburg, passing the service-ready but unused Rea Vaya bus stations in the median of Pretoria Main Road.
Mogano spends R20 each way commuting from her home in Bramley to her office in Parktown. She disembarks near Hillbrow and covers the rest of the journey to her office on foot. Mogano could cut her commuting costs in half and travel door-to-door if she made the same trip on Rea Vaya — one of the reasons she relocated to Bramley from Midrand in the first place. A Property24 listing advertised Rea Vaya access as an amenity. That was two years ago.
Joburg mayor Dada Morero ceremonially opened the 16km bus corridor on October 23. Official channels promised a November 1 launch date for the public. But commuters had to wait another month, and there are still countless teething problems.
Rea Vaya — slang for “we are moving” — is Joburg’s bus rapid transit (BRT) system. Consensus among urban planners stipulates that a true BRT system ought to feature platform-level boarding, dedicated right of way, traffic signal priority, off-board fare collection and bus-only corridor alignments.
These time-saving interventions were pioneered in South America. After commissioning a feasibility study in 2006, the City of Joburg sent a delegation of elected officials and representatives from taxi associations to Bogotá to study the Colombian capital’s TransMilenio system. Since 2000 Bogotá had been operating a network of express routes complemented by feeder services as part of its integrated public transport system.
Rehana Moosajee served as MMC for transport from 2006 to 2013 under then mayor Amos Masondo. Moosajee accompanied Masondo to Colombia. She recalls envisioning a promising path forward for rapidly growing cities such as Joburg — which was already struggling to implement traditional bus services in areas where taxi associations dominated the market.
Rea Vaya’s inaugural trunk route, Phase 1A, opened in 2009, just in time for the 2010 Fifa World Cup, and connected Thokoza Park in Soweto with Ellis Park in Doornfontein. Phase 1B debuted in 2013 to service Braamfontein and Auckland Park, linking with the south at Coronationville and New Canada.
Joburg transport department executive director Lutando Maboza spoke to the FM just as the first buses finally entered commercial service on December 1 this year.
“I don’t know what happened between 2010 and now,” he says. “The infrastructure wasn’t maintained, and no-one was thinking about the fleet. It’s only now that we are really working hard on getting these new buses and fixing our infrastructure, and I can tell you now the only thing that is really going to get people comfortable is getting new buses. Once we rebuild that infrastructure and have a proper company and enough buses, we will exceed Cape Town.”
Phase 1C(a), the route that motivated Mogano to move to Bramley, broke ground in March 2014. The 16km route connecting the Joburg and Sandton CBDs via Louis Botha Avenue was envisioned by then mayor Parks Tau as a “corridor of freedom”. But the city’s highest office has changed hands 10 times since Tau’s tenure ended in 2016. The concept lost all traction.
Stanley Cebekhulu, a deputy director in the city’s transport department, points out that passengers with disabilities are often unable to board the Rea Vaya platforms without assistance from a wheelchair lift. Cebekhulu says the lift equipment on many high-level Rea Vaya vehicles has not been maintained and the agency has struggled to source spare parts from overseas.
It will be difficult to provide a service that is as easy and as flexible as the minibus taxi industry
— Rose Luke
The National Treasury is mandated to ensure that grants allocated for transport projects “incorporate a universal design and access requirement”. This means that for the city to receive a public transport network grant for projects like Rea Vaya, the infrastructure and service must be accessible to everyone.
Urban policy experts interviewed by the FM have pointed to some big-picture issues to look out for.
“Public transport in South Africa will be able to sell itself as a solution only if there’s a clear benefit to it,” says Rose Luke, a professor of transport economics at the University of Johannesburg. “At the moment, you’re sitting in the traffic in a bus along with everyone else. You might as well be sitting in a car. But if there’s a clear benefit and you can see that it’s easier to travel by BRT, you’ve got a greater chance of success.”
According to Luke, BRT success requires high-frequency service, safety, convenience and reliable information about how to navigate the network. She identifies a stumbling block familiar to Gauteng drivers. “BRT [should] have total priority on the roads. Here we’ve got little barriers, just rumble strips. So it’s easy for other users and taxis to jump onto the bus lane.”
Moosajee recalls the original vision for car competitiveness entailed private drivers “sitting there stuck in traffic and the buses would literally be zooming by. That’s why you have dedicated bus lanes. But the lack of protection of that suggests to me that somewhere along the line the vision got clouded.”
Luke says a “convincing modal shift” remains to be seen. “There might be a little bit of a move from taxis to BRT, but there’s no real shift from car ridership. To be able to achieve that, you’ve got to be able to run a system that’s as attractive as the Gautrain.”
Moreover, Luke says, “it will be difficult to provide a service that is as easy and as flexible as the minibus taxi industry”. She believes co-operation with taxis — as a feeder system to the BRT, for example — would be a step towards what Joburg ultimately needs: a strong intermodal system. She points out that it requires a degree of political will for the government to work with taxi associations.
Of the city’s partnership with the two Alexandra-based taxi associations now contracted to operate Phase 1C(a), Maboza says: “We are working together. All they want to do is to build a proper company.”
The Alexandra Bus Company is using 68 second-hand buses and must order 141 new ones, which Maboza figures will take two years. In the meantime, he is focused on ensuring the long-awaited infrastructure does what it was built to do on the narrow, winding and often congested Louis Botha Avenue.
He notes: “It’s very difficult to change driver behaviour here in South Africa. Our only hope now is to make sure that our metro police do what they need to do” — that is, using fines to enforce the bus-only nature of the Rea Vaya lanes.
“Joburg is moving rapidly towards becoming a megacity and I can’t see that slowing any time soon. You cannot just keep on adding taxis into the equation. The infrastructure simply can’t cope,” says Luke.
Kayla Brown is the programme manager for Inclusive Cities at the South African Cities Network. Brown looks back at the “corridors of freedom” project to emphasise the importance of continuity in ambitious infrastructure undertakings.
Corridors of freedom, she says, “took the concept of integrated transport and understood that it could be a tool for very radical transformation. So, not just moving commuters but also seeing how you reconceptualise the areas around those routes. Is it an opportunity to bring in affordable housing? Bring in mixed-use development? Change some of the zoning laws that would open incentives for the private sector to get involved with densification along those routes?
“But when you have these quick [political] turnovers, such a long-term project … is unable to get traction and the support that is needed”.
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