With the City of Cape Town’s feasibility study on taking over the management of passenger rail from the national government underway, an expert in public transport has expressed the worry that the train may have already left the station.
Prof Roger Behrens, Director: Centre for Transport Studies, Department of Civil Engineering, University of Cape Town (UCT), says parts of South Africa’s railway infrastructure have essentially been stripped.
“I just hope it is not too late. Three or four years ago, transport operators in the private sector were quite keen on being partners in rail. They might be looking at the current infrastructure and be thinking, ‘We can’t replace the rolling stock, resuscitate infrastructure and take on operating concessions’.”
On Friday 1 July, the feasibility study started with SMEC South Africa as the appointed professional services provider to conduct the study.
Rob Quintas, the City’s Mayco member for urban mobility, says the City’s vision is to create a fully integrated public transport system, which will include passenger rail as its backbone.
“But first off, we need to understand the feasibility, risk, and implications for the City by taking over passenger rail from the national government. The study will address these burning questions, especially as passenger rail in Cape Town has imploded to a level where it is barely functioning,” says Quintas.
Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis says a critical requirement for the study is access to all of the financial and technical information associated with operating the current rail system.
“We need the cooperation of Prasa, and the National Department of Transport,” he says.
He cites the White Paper on National Rail Policy as a reason to hope for “a collaborative, cooperative effort”.
Approved on 23 March, the White Paper acknowledges the importance of devolving public transport functions to the lowest level of the government. The Minister of Transport, Fikile Mbalula, stated that “the Department of Transport would work on a framework with the South African Local Government Association (Salga) to guide efforts by municipalities to build requisite capacity that will enable the assignment based on the capacity of cities to manage the rail function within the broader ambit of its Integrated Public Transport Plan”.
The White Paper also introduces secondary interventions “that will give effect to institutional repositioning and allow for on-rail competition”. In other words, private sector participation – with the emphasis on participation only. Behrens cautions that devolving rail functions to the City may be more difficult than the White Paper suggests.
“One of the limitations in our national land transport legislation is its silence on rail.
‘The National Land Transport Act 5 of 2009 enables certain powers and functions to be devolved from provincial government to municipalities, particularly contracting subsidised buses, like Golden Arrow, and issuing of operating licences to minibus-taxis.”
He says this goes back to when Brett Herron was the Mayco member for transport (from 2011 to 2018).
“The City did apply for this devolution (for the bus and mini-bus-taxi services) but they still don’t have them.”
He says there is a history of stalling when it comes to devolving functions that are made possible in the legislation to the metropoles.
“If there is going to be the kind of rail devolution that is being spoken about, there needs to be some kind of legislative empowerment,” he says.
Behrens says when you look at international cases where the public monopolies were broken up, they didn’t always involve everything being devolved into the lower level of government.
“What you see devolved in other parts of the world are the planning, management and regulation functions. Imagine a situation where they will now have the devolved powers to decide on operational questions. For example, how long they operate, the timetable, the ticket prices, discounts moving from buses to taxis.”
Municipalities could then concession out operations to private entities that would operate according to contracted service provision which would hold them to account.
“The rolling stock would be leased by those operators from the national entity. They could lease the access to track as well.”
Reflecting on the decline of the infrastructure, Behrens says what will be crucial is giving concessionaires responsibility for security and enabling them to do that. Let alone cables, he says is even hearing reports of tracks being stolen.
“There comes a point when you say something has to be done here. Institutionally, there is a problem.
“We need to come up with a new institutional arrangement that not only deals with real service performance but also underlying asset protection.”
However, he says he hasn’t seen enough about the threats and challenges that exists around rail assets in the White Paper.
“If we are just talking about concessioning and not the basic context in which they are run, that doesn’t seem to have good prospects of being successful.”
What is encouraging, he says, is that the White Paper does recognise the need for investment in the rehabilitation of metropolitan networks. Depending on the degree to which they can be rehabilitated (with the national government carrying the cost), he says it might improve the prospects of drawing private sector interest.
“You can’t expect private investors to fork out millions to rehabilitate and then not own the rolling stock or tracks,” says Behrens.
In 2018, Frontier Transport Holdings (Golden Arrow’s holding company) invested in a comprehensive proposal – submitted to the national government and Prasa – to run trains along the southern suburbs line.
Bronwen Dyke-Beyer, public relations manager for Golden Arrow Bus Services, says, at the time, the provincial government and the Western Cape Minister for Transport and Public Works were excited about the proposal and facilitated discussions with the national government.
“Unfortunately, there have been various administration changes since that time, which has delayed the discussion process,” says Dyke-Beyer.
The proposal is for a pilot project rail corridor concession which would be based on a partnering and collaborative model comprised of Frontier Transport Holdings, Prasa and the government.
“The primary aim would be to use private capital to stabilise, optimise and further develop a selected rail line in Cape Town,”she says.
Dyke-Beyer says Frontier is still pursuing the partnership opportunity and has been engaging with government entities at various levels.
“Over time, aspects of the proposal may be updated, but in principle, we, are still engaging with stakeholders in order to move the project forward,” she says.
