Fuelling the taxi violence
Interventions to avert clashes over routes can have detrimental effect and cost lives
OVER the past 30 years, South Africa’s taxi industry has grown tremendously. At the moment, 15 million South Africans rely on taxis for their daily commutes.
Some of the vehicles are minibus taxis that belong to organised associations; others are mostly four or seven-door sedans such as Toyota Avanzas, whose drivers and owners tend not to belong to formal groupings.
Violence is common on the country’s taxi routes. In the most recent incident, four members of rival taxi associations were gunned down in Hout Bay. The crime is reportedly linked to competition over routes between two rival taxi associations.
The kind of violent competition over routes that led to the deaths in Hout Bay has characterised the taxi industry since its deregulation in 1987.
The industry remains one of the most profitable entrepreneurial paths.
The late 1980s and early 1990s saw the rise of taxi “mother bodies” that attempted to monopolise routes with the threat violence. In response, the government tightened regulations on taxis. The key intervention was to issue licences for specific associations on specific routes.
Individual taxi owners had to apply to join an association that enjoyed exclusive rights to a route. In effect, the government limited competition to reduce the likelihood of violence and bad driving.
This strategy has reduced but not eliminated violence. This is because new operators emerge all the time or ambitious bosses try their luck against rivals. But sometimes the state too is to blame – albeit sometimes because of unintended consequences.
As research published in our new book Democracy Disconnected: Participation and Governance in a City of the South shows, the complicated and contradictory nature of local governance can worsen as well as contain taxi violence.
The implicit business model of taxis is a low-profit per fare but high volume of fares. Taxi drivers have to meet daily targets before earning their own wage. This model not only incentivises drivers to transport large volumes of passengers, but transfers much of the risk associated with frequent petrol price increases on to the driver.
This means the taxi industry isn’t just competitive but that this competition most keenly affects drivers whose livelihoods depend on moving large numbers quickly.
Hence, when competition over routes heat up, the government tries to formalise taxis through licensing. The intention is to reduce conflict (and bad vehicles and bad driving) by improving livelihood security though guaranteeing business on a route.
Unfortunately, this bureaucratic intervention doesn’t always work as intended.
For example, in Hout Bay, a major route for the area was allocated to an association whose owners were not from Hout Bay. This marginalised another association whose owners were from the area.
Another intervention by the City – the introduction of a Bus Rapid Transport (BRT) system that includes taxi owners as owners in the new company – only complicated matters further.
The BRT was informed by the revolutionary public transport system developed in Bogota, Colombia. Cape Town’s version was conceived as a key part of an integrated public transport network to improve on the existing public transport in the build up to the 2010 Soccer World Cup.
Its introduction has had a profound impact on Hout Bay’s taxi industry. That’s because one of the BRT’s key business features is to buy out taxi owners by incorporating those with licences into vehicle operating companies that would be contracted by the City to run the buses used for the BRT for 12 years.
The idea was to give taxi owners a vested interest in the BRT and so promote co-operation rather than conflict. By and large this approach appears to have worked in Hout Bay: the route from the area to the CBD is reportedly one of the BRT’s top performers.
But not all taxi owners working the Hout Bay to Cape Town route were included in the deal.
A number of taxi drivers summarily lost their jobs as their owners bought into the BRT without informing them. As a consequence a group of taxi owners from one association continued to operate illegally in Hout Bay, using an informal taxi rank near the police station.
While the BRT plan was intended to ease tensions with most formal taxi owners in Hout Bay – and to lessen the threat of violence and protest – it also appears to have unintentionally exacerbated them. Some taxi owners and drivers feel squeezed out of the market so they operate informally.
Governance is crucial. This all shows that a number of conflicts are playing out over transport in Hout Bay. These are rooted in the contradictory logic of contending forms of market, bureaucratic and developmental governance.
The drive for business profit sits in tension with bureaucratic attempts to reduce violence and improve road safety.
It can also sit in tension with developmental attempts to provide affordable, accessible transport using buses.
Getting this balance between these contending social goods is tough, especially in a context where getting it wrong can cost lives. But if nothing else it shows how important well designed, consistent and thoughtful local governance is to the daily commute (and lives) of all South Africans. |