As Transport Month enters its second week, the City of Cape Town is continuing to encourage public discussion on the current experiences of public transport in the city.
By completing the comment form, you will be helping the City’s Transport Department gain a better understanding of what commuters expect from a public transport system and how it can be improved, as well as assisting in developing the City’s 2012-2016 Integrated Transport Plan, which will guide the expansion and maintenance of the City’s transport systems and infrastructure.
The topic of discussion for the second week of October is public transport infrastructure, such as park-and-ride facilities and public transport interchanges.
Park-and-ride facilities are parking areas where commuters leave their private vehicles in order to catch public transport and are generally situated at or near rail stations. These facilities play an important role in reducing congestion which reduces our carbon footprint and saves money. The use of public transport also reduces the time people spend sitting in traffic and this improves their quality of life.
The City’s long-term plan is to expand the Bus Rapid Transit concept (as seen in MyCiTi), consisting of feeders and trunks, throughout Cape Town. A feeder system is a smaller public transport vehicle collecting passengers in a specific area and transporting them to a collection point from where they interchange to larger vehicles on dedicated lanes referred to as a trunk bus services or the passenger rail system.
The City will continue to provide and upgrade park-and-ride facilities in accordance with the Transport Department’s mandate of “Putting public transport, people and quality of life first”. The department is also looking at expanding the park-and-ride facilities from parking areas only to economic hubs with bicycle racks, retail outlets, services and landscaping.
A Public Transport Interchange (PTI) is a facility where commuters can interchange between various modes of transport such as bus, train, taxi, cycling and walking.
The City’s Transport Department has developed more than 200 PTIs, some catering for large numbers of people moving through all day long. The City is responsible for the operation, upkeep and maintenance of these facilities. Criminal activities, including vandalism, and people’s general lack of respect for their environment add substantially to the operational costs involved. At some facilities the cleaning crews have to clear the mess left behind by commuters twice a day.
These ever escalating costs limit the City’s ability to improve and expand the services and provide a “quality of life” experience to the users of PTIs. The City recently introduced a programme to deploy dedicated law enforcement officers to reduce vandalism and crime and improve commuters’ overall experience of public transport in Cape Town. Although this is a step in the right direction commuters and the public at large are urged to act responsibly by reporting vandalism, refraining from engaging in illegal activities and doing their bit to keep the PTI clean and tidy.
