31 July 2024
Passenger rail in Cape Town is functioning at a fraction of its capacity from over a decade ago, after the national operator PRASA was ransacked by state capturers. Archive photo: Ashraf Hendricks
The newly appointed Minister of Transport, Barbara Creecy, has been “incredibly responsive” to the City of Cape Town’s request to discuss shifting the management of Metrorail from PRASA to the municipality.
Mayco Member for Urban Mobility Roberto Quintas says communication with the new minister so far consisted of “a few WhatsApp chats” and was informal, but he was confident Creecy would “be a new broom”.
“I’m confident that serious inroads can be made, with many things … including our account-based ticketing, including the rail devolution strategy,” said Quintas during an exclusive interview in his Civic Centre office. (Account-based ticketing allows customers to use a debit card to get a ticket.)
The May 2022 gazetting of the White Paper on National Rail Policy, gazetted in May 2022, allows for capable municipalities to manage rail networks in their city. But previous transport ministers have stonewalled the City’s attempts to develop a rail devolution strategy.
In August last year, Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis threatened to lodge an intergovernmental dispute against PRASA after numerous unsuccessful attempts to negotiate a Service Level Agreement (SLA) with PRASA over the running of Metrorail, which is the rail passenger service in Cape Town and to surrounding areas such as Stellenbosch and Wellington.
It appeared Hill-Lewis’s threat did shift attitudes. Quintas said City of Cape Town officials were given more access to the national department’s devolution planning and strategy committee meetings. “Our officials were made to feel a lot more welcome and included … but we’re still quite frankly very much outsiders on it.”
In the meantime, and with no input from the national Department of Transport or PRASA, the City of Cape Town had pressed on with their own feasibility study for the devolution of rail, he said.
The study has modelled various scenarios, said Quintas, ranging from doing nothing, to completely managing rail in the city and surrounding areas without any funding or subsidy – a situation which would potentially bankrupt the City.
While the lack of information from the national transport department and PRASA meant the study is happening “in a vacuum”, the experts conducting it “know what to look for and where to look for it”.
He said the study was about 70% complete and would be put before council for approval at the end of this year or early next year, before being presented to the national transport department.
The scenarios the City are investigating include public private partnerships, working with PRASA, replacing PRASA, or creating a separate entity involving the City, PRASA, and the Western Cape Government.
Some scenarios were more likely than others, but Quintas stressed the City was “really working in a spirit of cooperation”.
“We have no intention of a hostile takeover,” said Quintas. “We believe in partnerships, between other spheres of government, organs of state, and the private sector.”
Quintas would not be drawn on the contents of the City’s study, but he did provide some clues as to what it might contain.
He said globally, in cities with functioning passenger rail, the municipality was the planning and management authority, but not necessarily the operator.
In many cases, rail was operated by a private company which was subsidised by the state. Such international transport operators “could establish a presence here” provided they met transformation requirements, “to do what they do best, which is run trains on time in a safe and reliable manner”. Quintas said he was not sure a government was the right entity to run an efficient train service. A partnership with a private sector player seemed to be the City’s preference. Although private companies exist to make a profit, government subsidies would keep ticket prices affordable, he said.
It seemed the MyCiTi bus was at least partly being used for the City’s rail devolution study, as an example of a public-private partnership.
“We subsidise the operations of the MyCiTi bus service through 5% of rates … And Vehicle Operating Companies run the service, and your municipality is a regulatory entity.” However, he said MyCiTi was unusual in that the City was “both, administrator, and operator to a degree”.
“Considering it is a subsidised service run largely by a public private partnership, it potentially offers a model for Cape Town’s rail devolution strategy.”
Quintas said that he would like to see the taxi industry working with the City to provide feeder services to rail and MyCiTi trunk routes.
“We’ve had one very brief eagle-eye discussion with Santaco about the fact that we are firmly of the opinion they would actually make more money with the trains running.”
Taxis were currently inching along the N1 and N2 during peak traffic, with a set number of passengers until they got to their destination at the taxi rank. “Then have to turn around, race to get back to pick up another load and then sit in traffic again.”
The taxis could be making numerous short journeys with a high passenger turnover, picking up people and dropping them off at the nearest train or MyCiTi station, from which they would continue their journey to or from the city. “Devolution would naturally want to include every component of the transport ecosystem, in which the taxis play an essential part.”
Quintas said the City had been trying to get a Service Level Agreement (SLA) developed and signed with PRASA so that each entity could identify and honour their responsibilities. He said PRASA had agreed to work toward a Memorandum of Understanding, but this was not legally enforceable, unlike an SLA.
“I can understand their hesitation to sign an SLA given the colossal challenges they’re facing,” he said, as the rail infrastructure had been steadily declining from at least 2015, with the Covid period resulting in an “absolute decline to the point of scuttling the rail service”.
While PRASA was slowly improving the service, with extra trains on the Southern Line running more regularly, and efforts being made to re-establish the crucial Central Line, it still was not reliable enough to encourage people who owned cars to rather use the train.
“All we care about is rail working. … If it was working under PRASA, we could get on with what we need to do.”
But negotiations for an SLA were “back on track”, and with PRASA CEO Hishaam Emeran, there was “no issue with cooperation”. However, PRASA could only do what the national transport department allowed them to do, said Quintas. Creecy’s cooperation was thus vital, and her responsiveness and willingness to meet once she was back in Cape Town provided hope, he said. And once the City’s feasibility study for rail devolution was published, it could perhaps provide a blueprint that other cities could adapt to their unique requirements.
“We might see some movement toward the end of this year, maybe next year with the national government coming to the party.”
“Our objective is simple: to get passenger rail back up and running in the quickest possible way, so that it can become once again a reliable form of mass public transport. It needs to be a mass people mover at really affordable prices.”