På svenska
Programme led to new strategy for public transport in South Africa
One part of the transport sector where Sweden is particularly strong
is in the planning of public transport, a field where many developing
countries run into great difficulty. Helping the participants to
identify problems and develop strategies for solving them is one of the
most important aims of the Sida training programme “Urban Transport”.
One frequently encountered problem is lack of coordination between
state, municipal and private actors, something to which one programme
participant, Michael Kridiotis from Buffalo City, South Africa, has
successfully turned his attention.
In Buffalo City, in South
Africa’s Eastern Cape Province, the problems are largely the same as in
other urban areas of the country. Public transport consists of a more or
less functional system of municipal buses in competition with a large
fleet of private minibus taxis, many of them in dangerously poor
condition.
Repeated attempts by the authorities to deal with the
dangerous minibus taxis have failed. Ideas like car-scrapping premiums
and attempts to institute timetabled services with licencing agreements
have had little effect. The problem is aggravated by the fact that many
of those who are injured and killed in traffic in South Africa are
passengers in minibus taxis.
Michael Kridiotis, who works as
general manager of transport planning and operations, began after the
Sida programme at Lund University to formulate a new strategy, inspired
by public transport in Sweden, where the informal public transport
system will gradually become more formalised and regulated.
The
basic idea is that the local authority buses will provide regular trunk
services on particularly busy routes and the services offered by private
actors will be procured competitively to act as feeder services to bus
interchanges and train stations.
Gradually the agreements with the
private actors will be put on a more formal footing as regards routes,
areas served and regular stops for boarding and alighting. The
agreements should be general and only specify, for example, type of
vehicle, number of vehicles and siting of stops. In this way the formal
and the informal systems could be complementary, instead of competing
with each other. In the longer term the private actors should become
fully integrated in the formal public transport system.
Michael
Kridiotis’ strategy has been well received and attracted notice in the
journal “Civil Engineering” (September 2006) and elsewhere. The ideas
have also been picked up by another city not far away in the same
province and the strategy will be implemented in collaboration.
Last modified 10 Sep 2010
For Buffalo City to be successful, it is essential to improve the public
transport system, according to the City's general manager for transport
planning and operations, Michael Kridiotis.
Read
more: Better public transport "essential"
Employees in the Buffalo City Transport Planning and Operations Department yesterday proved you do not need motorised transport to get to work when they took part in the first-ever Cycle-to-Work Day. The idea was the brainchild of the department's General Manager, Michael Kridiotis (middle), following a recent visit to Sweden.