Cape Town's MyCiti Cape Flats phase under construction is arguably the single most significant example of wasteful expenditure in the city right now. Costing R8.5 billion, when complete, it will put Cape Town Stadium in second place.
UCT associate professor of civil engineering and transport, Romano del Mistro said at master's degree seminars I attended (2006/7) that public transport projects' costs must not exceed their benefit to citizens. He was talking about Gautrain, a very expensive political legacy project, but said the principle applied to MyCiti and other rapid bus transit systems too.
Already certain MyCiti routes in the City Bowl and Table View (the original route) have had to close because they were unviable. But the city's politicians and planners have not learned the lesson.
They're pushing ahead with another grand project - dedicated, exclusive bus lanes, sky bridges, expropriating houses to make way for the extra wide roads - rather than the simple yet effective transit system the city needs at almost half the cost of the current model. Here, unnecessary expenditure is billions.
Harvard Growth Lab's Prof Ricardo Hausmann (co-author of a recent multi-year study of SA's growth prospects) spoke, among other things but regarding spatial inclusion, with researcher Ann Bernstein about South Africa's bus rapid transit systems (Politicsweb February 5):
"[Due to apartheid, SA] cities have low densities in their centres and suburbs. In such very spread out cities, typical public transport solutions do not work. South Africa has copied bus rapid transit systems from Latin America, which were designed for a certain [high] level of density. These systems allocate a dedicated line [lane] to a bus so that it doesn't have to be stuck in traffic. For that to work, the lane has to be full of buses all the time, otherwise you are just restricting all the other traffic and you are not solving the transportation problem (emphasis). Many people won't use the bus [rapid transit] system because they don't want to wait 20 minutes, so they prefer to take a taxi ..."
Hausmann does not mention the cost to build SA cities' individual systems, imported from abroad without modification for local conditions, but the cost and opportunity cost in financial, economic and time lost is substantial. MyCiti is comparable to government insisting on expensive coal or nuclear it can't afford that has up to 15 year lead times when far cheaper green energy can be ready in two years.
Elaborate, expensive, inflexible systems that attempt to be the sole unique provider without accommodating changing user patterns and preferences are bound to have problems and be unfit for its purpose.
Politicians won't admit they're out of their depth and won't ever admit they're wrong. The key difference between the ANC and DA, though, is the ANC doesn't pretend anymore it knows what its doing whereas the DA insists it does despite frequent evidence to the contrary.
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