Better public transport the number one priority

Durban's authorities tell Tony Carnie how they plan to keep its people on the move. What is Durban doing to avoid a future nightmare of bumper-to-bumper traffic snarl-ups as a growing army of commuters clog up the city's congested road arteries?

Will the city ever build its own mass commuter transport system like the London Underground or the Paris Metro?

Is KwaZulu-Natal thinking about setting up a provincial fuel levy or a network of provincial toll roads? And will the much-vaunted Durban to Gauteng "speed train" ever leave the station?

These are some of the questions The Mercury put to senior eThekwini Municipality officials and the KZN Transport Department, to establish what plans were in place to deal with a wide range of transport challenges in the short to long term.

The provincial Transport Department did not respond to queries, but the eThekwini Metro Council has outlined some of the transport plans it is developing to take the city through to the year 2020.

Logan Moodley, Deputy Head of Strategic Planning for the eThekwini Transport Authority, said he doubted that Durban could sustain anything as ambitious as the tube or metro because the city had much lower population densities than London or New York.

Nevertheless, the city was investigating funding options for above-ground trams and monorails for parts of Durban.

Moodley acknowledged that most of Durban's major freeways were suffering from "varying degrees of congestion" and that several feeder routes were also clogged by the knock-on effects.

"We have to take a holistic view to address our present and future transport demand - and we have to acknowledge that we cannot continuously build ourselves out of congestion," said Moodley.

"Our first priority is improving public transport so that we can move more people as opposed to moving more vehicles."

Moodley said there were no plans at this stage to restrict the number of vehicles entering the inner city, as was happening in several large cities around the world.

Singapore was one of the first countries to impose a form of congestion toll fee in 1975 to reduce inner-city traffic problems during the morning peak period.

This inner-city vehicle licence scheme was later extended to cover the entire day, while the Italian city of Bologna reduced the number of cars by almost 50% by introducing a city-centre permit system in 1989.

Athens, Lagos, Mexico City and Sao Paulo have also experimented with an "odds-and-evens" scheme that only permits cars with number plates ending with an odd digit to enter the city on odd days, while cars with even-ending numbers can only enter on the other days.

Elsewhere, Hong Kong and Copenhagen have attempted to limit car ownership by pushing up the costs of vehicle registration and annual taxes.

Copenhagen is also reducing the number of parking bays in the inner city by 3% a year, while the cities of Lucerne and Bremen have encouraged the formation of car-sharing clubs.

In Durban, however, Moodley said much more had to be done to improve public transport before car-reliant commuters would feel comfortable to switch to mass transit.

In the short term, the city would install electronic "variable message signs" and close-circuit television cameras on certain routes to warn the public in advance about traffic congestion and alternative routing proposals.

It was also evaluating the merits of dedicated public transport lanes or ride-sharing lanes common in several American cities - an idea that was also being tried on the Ben Schoeman highway between Gauteng and Pretoria during peak periods.

Researchers from the University of Pretoria noted recently that the number of cars in South Africa had increased by a whopping 72% in the 24-year period between 1972 and 1996.

A National Department of Transport study predicted that the number of cars on our roads would grow by another 63% over the next 15 years because of poor public transport alternatives, the low cost of operating private cars and the steady investment in road infrastructure.

Moodley believes that rail should play a much more significant role in Durban's public transport planning.

"The eThekwini Transport Authority has developed a plan to start addressing the key issues along the north-south rail line, in conjunction with the rail authorities, so that this corridor serves as the backbone of the public transport system."

He said Transnet had committed resources to upgrading the existing passenger rolling stock, signal systems and security. Once this happened, the city would encourage more feeder services to this corridor.

"We are also working towards a fully integrated service with a through-ticketing facility to facilitate seamless travel through the system."

Moodley also believes it is essential to reduce the volume of freight carried on busy roads through better use of the rail network and stricter enforcement for overloading.

The pros and cons of road versus rail have become a hotly disputed arena since the deregulation of road transport industry in the mid 1980s.

During the Southern African Transport Conference in Pretoria last year, it emerged that almost 30% of the vehicles using the Durban to Gauteng N3 highway were heavy vehicles - while Spoornet's freight trains on the same route were running at only 35% capacity.

Johan van der Mescht, of the Nelson Mandela University in Port Elizabeth, reported that nearly 75% of long-haul tonnage in South Africa was conveyed by road rather than rail.

He acknowledged that many of the recent criticisms of Spoornet were justified, but he denied suggestions that rail had become a technologically redundant mode of transport.

"Most businesses in South Africa are very dependent on the services provided by road transport companies and their positive contribution to the economic growth cannot be ignored.

"Unfortunately, it is also clear that some road freight operators are focused on maximising their profits and nothing else."

He said that an unacceptably high number of overloaded heavies were damaging the national road network and imposing so many hidden costs to the taxpayer that government intervention could soon be necessary to stop the continuing abuse of the public road infrastructure.

"Drastic intervention" was also needed to improve Spoornet's efficiency and the dilapidated rail infrastructure.

Unfortunately, he said, South Africa's rail network used a narrower rail gauge of 1 067mm, compared to the international standard gauge of 1 435mm. The vertical and horizontal clearances along local railway tracks were also smaller than international norms - restricting the height and width of rail vehicles.

One of the penalties of this was that South Africa's railway system could not accommodate modern, double-stack container wagons.

Railway line distances between major cities were also considerably longer than equivalent distances by road, because many rail lines were built to avoid high mountain ranges and deep river basins. The Durban to Johannesburg route, for example, was 580km by road, but 688km by rail.

These technical restraints were likely to remain part of South Africa's rail legacy because converting to international standard gauge or re-aligning the tracks to shorten distances was not an economically feasible option.

Nevertheless, Van Der Mescht believes that the Spoornet system can still be managed better to compete with road transport.

One alternative, he suggested, was high-speed container trains to offer a viable alternative to road transport.

Late last year, KZN Premier S'bu Ndebele also raised the idea of building a Speed Train between Durban and Johannesburg as part of the 2010 soccer World Cup national rail plan.

Ndebele said the train could make the journey in three hours by travelling at 200km/h, and funding proposals had been made to the National Transport Department.