The power of one

I AGREE with Agi Orfanos, with the exception that the problems with MyCiti had been a point of discussion with the minister of transport, the Department of Transport as well as the parliamentary standing committee on transport going back many years.

MyCiti is heavily subsidised and equally overloaded.

Metrorail was running fine until the public broke it. It took all sorts of protests, unrelated to Metrorail, to see sabotage and arson on a large scale.

I am the person who had the “red all around” traffic lights effected in the CBD, with help from Paul Oliver, Sean Glass and so on. The same politicians who had opposed it since 2004 then claimed the honour, of course. The proposed improvements sound great.

I wrote an article to the Cape Times, to explain Metrorail, but the journalist failed to follow up with me.

Who am I? The disabled person who had also effected the replacement of escalators by the Golden Acre and leading to Cape Town Station. It was also upon my initiative that the Old Mutual Arcade ones were restored. The ones in Grand Parade were replaced after having been out of service for more than two years. It was done with the help of former transport minister Dipuo Peters, who had also helped with MyCiti issues.

She had seconded Mthura Swartz, the national executive of Prasa Main Line Services, to assist. Swartz is humble and achieves a lot; he was the Metrorail chief executive until 2014.

The official version will probably differ, but the above is the truth. If one concerned citizen can get so much done in a year, I would encourage Orfanos to move the world to improve services.

I am just through with incompetence. We can and should do better in #lovecapetown. Pete “Mafutha” Louw Tygerdal