SA’s top 2 cities in a jam over traffic
CAPETONIANS may not have e-tolls, but they pay a hidden tax for living in the shadow of Table Mountain: the worst traffic in South Africa.
With a four-hour morning peak, Cape Town was ranked the world’s 48th most-congested city in this year’s TomTom Traffic Index. Johannesburg was 70th in a ranking of 390 cities.
A key element of the City of Cape Town’s travel demand management strategy, adopted this week, is the changing of commuters’ behaviour to reduce pressure on the roads. To set an example, the council has introduced flexitime for many of its 27 000 employees in the hope it will ease the rush-hour flow of vehicles into the CBD.
Brett Herron, the mayoral committee member for transport and urban development, said: “We have to shift behaviour or congestion will keep getting worse. Our strategy is threefold: to improve infrastructure; to improve public transport; and to drive behaviour change, which removes cars from the roads, spreads the peak hour [and] promotes public transport, walking and cycling. We will also engage the provincial government and private companies about similar shifts, including a compressed work week (40 hours in four days).”
Allan Gray, with offices at the V&A Waterfront, is one such company. Its head of facilities management, Michael Smith, said the company had informal flexitime and a small “hot desk” workspace outside the CBD for staff not wanting to travel into the city.
The company has teamed up with other corporates to launch car pools “and last year we increased parking costs for staff to make alternate transport forms more attractive by comparison”, he said.
“We also started contributing towards staff commuting costs if they do not bring a car to work.”
The city council is also investigating a carrot and stick approach to parking: paying cash to employees who give up parking spaces, and increasing levies for parking bays and onstreet parking.
In its fight to ease traffic congestion, Johannesburg will spend R45-million on 180 traffic lights, put metro cops at intersections where the robots are out, and set up a 24-hour centre and hotline where drivers can report problems.
Its top priority is robots and improving their function.
The city also encouraged flexitime and different shifts to minimise road congestion and maximise productivity.
Herron said Cape Town had rolled out 450km of cycle tracks but only about 1% of cyclists used them to get to work.
Then there are the skateboarders: travel consultant Paulo Florencio, 26, uses his to travel between Gardens and his office on the Foreshore five days a week.
“It is easier and faster to come to work by longboard than waiting for buses or taking a car,” he said. “But it can be dangerous if you don’t know what you are doing.”