It’s 28°C on a cloudless afternoon at Joburg’s Gandhi Square bus station. The air smells of baking tar and diesel. Most people lean against the bus shelter metal railings (there are no seats) and stare anxiously in the direction their bus ought to come from. Sometimes for hours. For Metrobus commuters in the Joburg CBD, this is rush hour.
The Joburg entity was established in 2000 as an intra-urban transportation company fully owned by the city. It is not to be confused with the Rea Vaya bus rapid transit system, which is also fully owned by the city and is being expanded in anticipation of November’s G20 summit.
According to Metrobus’s most recent midyear report, 382 buses ply 80 routes, reaching everywhere from Megawatt Park in the north to Rosettenville in the south, with a central hub at Gandhi Square.
However, the report notes that 98 of the 382 buses are more than 23 years old.
The age of the buses is doubtlessly linked to the fact that only 66% of bus journeys are completed — an extraordinary official admission by an entity charged with running a scheduled service.
The Metrobus mandate calls for “a safe, reliable, innovative and customer-focused” operation. Riders emphatically say Metrobus is none of those things.
Londiwe Zungu commutes to the CBD from Mulbarton in the south on route 49. She tells the FM that her local taxi associations are “horrible” and that she prefers to use Metrobus. But “from half-past [six], it doesn’t come. Seven o’clock, it doesn’t come. Sometimes I will just give up and use a taxi.”
For adults, Metrobus distance-based fares range from R14.20 to R35.30 — cheaper than a taxi in most cases. But Zungu says taxis are usually better maintained. “I don’t think they service their buses. We got stuck just the other day. When moving from Mulbarton to Glenvista, it’s very hilly. I mean, they should take that into consideration. Why give the driver a useless bus?”
Muhammed Suleman is a lecturer at the Wits School of Architecture & Planning. Regarding Metrobus, he says: “It really comes down to the simplest aspect that we struggle with in this country: to maintain what we have, and to ensure that we have monitoring and evaluation in place.
“And we shouldn’t just spend on new projects, but really work and re-establish the groundwork that we’ve already spent so much on, making sure that we continue to maintain it. Eventually you’re going to neglect a new system as well, and then you’re going to say: ‘Let’s look for something new now.’”
Metrobus does not accept cash or make it easy for would-be customers. Passengers can obtain and load Metrobus cards at only five retail locations, including Gandhi Square, where the bus company’s central service office distributes route maps and schedules on loose pieces of paper. Some of the official schedules have hand-drawn reference points on the back.
Employees readily admit that the schedules are out of date and not synchronised with Google Maps’s public transit planning feature. They’ll gladly hand out a schedule for the 80C bus (Randburg via Jan Smuts Avenue), but say it’s best to ask in person whether the bus will show up.
The bus bays in Gandhi Square aren’t marked, so passengers have to find out where they can catch their bus by asking a uniformed traffic marshal or crowdsourcing educated guesses from other commuters.
“They don’t care about people,” Zungu says. “The only thing they care about is money. You have old people waiting there for hours. They’re supposed to go to hospital. They’ll be standing there for hours.”
Suleman explains that bus riders have developed informal solutions, but these emphasise the difficulties of attracting new ridership.
“You have these ways of knowing what’s going on. What’s happening or not happening? Why is the bus delayed? Is this route running today? If you’re not part of these systems, you are basically left out. And that’s the biggest issue — you have to start developing coping mechanisms. Because if you don’t, you can’t just say: ‘Ah, you know what? Let me just use my car today, or let me just use another mode of public transport.”’
Neo Nnete, who rides the bus to Queens High School in Kensington, says: “They really don’t show up sometimes. I’m supposed to take an earlier bus, but it hasn’t been coming since the beginning of this term. It’s good to know the people around who use the same bus as you, so you communicate a lot.”
Brothers Storme and Luke Tainton, bound for Florida in the west, “just hope the bus shows up”, says Luke with a shrug. “I think it’s just not consistent,” Storme adds.
Mawabo Msingaphantsi, also of the Wits School of Architecture & Planning, argues that the Metrobus was never meant to be consistent.
“The way it’s talked about is rooted in its history. Joburg didn’t really want to have a public transport system. In the context of the postwar consensus that created American-style suburbanism, if your citizens have cars and houses with gardens, you have a prosperous city.”
Msingaphantsi says Metrobus is more ornamental than functional. “It was a decoration of the apartheid city, which is why, later on, transit policymakers became ambivalent about it. Do we try to take the taxi owners’ lunch? Formalise the taxi industry? Do we make Putco [a large and long-standing private bus company serving mainly black commuters] into a proper Metrobus?”
He says the taxis superseded Metrobus as a tool for navigating Joburg’s sprawling post-apartheid spatial geography. “Taxis cover the same routes. If we could have taxi owners operating buses that are comfortable, that’s what we would get.”
No matter how much they spend or don’t spend, they are still going to get the ridership
Suleman adds that the municipality does not have an incentive to improve the service. “No matter how much they spend or don’t spend, they are still going to get the ridership. Clearly, we’re still going to have people who are in need of public transport. As long as there’s a bus, people will figure out how to use it. They’ll make a plan. So the city is not worried about attracting people who would use the system out of choice.”
At the moment, there is no city councillor charged with addressing these concerns. In the most recent Metrobus report, the space for transport MMC Kenny Kunene’s signature was left blank. Kunene, a member of the Patriotic Alliance, resigned on July 26 amid controversy surrounding his alleged connections to a criminal syndicate.
Ridership is low for a city the size of Joburg. According to Metrobus, average weekday ridership in 2023 was 22,109. More than 90% of commuter traffic goes by private car or taxi. Ridership has been declining steadily over the past decade.
Metrobus spokesperson Tshepo Nathan concedes that the company regularly fields complaints from customers about service reliability. However, he reports 83% customer satisfaction based on a recent survey.
Regarding signage at Gandhi Square, Nathan tells the FM that “it is the first time that this matter has been brought to our attention. Metrobus has ensured that officials [dispatchers] are always available at the square to direct commuters and give information. The issue of signage will, however, be attended to.”
As at June 30, Metrobus owed the city R472m. Its total liability is R485m. Fare revenue in the 2024/2025 financial year was R19.4m, R4.9m short of the R24.3m target.
Metrobus has reported that its maintenance budget of R71m was reduced to an allocation of R37m, then unexpectedly reduced again to R29m. “To ensure continued operations,” it says, “it is crucial to maintain the fleet, as failing to do so could pose significant risks, particularly in the event of an accident involving a poorly serviced bus.
“The City [of Joburg] is responsible for managing the cash flow of the city and its entities. Any funds deposited into the bank by any entity is swept into the city’s bank account on the same day. The city is supposed to avail funds to the entity based on the entity’s cash forecast.”
The implication is that such funds are not made available, and therefore the decline of Metrobus will continue.
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