Metrorail: enough is enough

Tworking. abuse. of us. he argument in favour of the city – or anyone else for that matter – taking over Cape Town’s faltering Metrorail oper- ation is grimly underscored by the Cape Chamber of Commerce and Industry’s survey on the costs of the deepening failure of the city’s pri- mary public transport service. Doubtless, the survey is not scientific in the rigorous sense of measuring, with 99.9% certainty, the actual costs of our commuter service’s failures. But even introducing as much as a 20% margin of error, the picture – as long-suffering commuters know all too well – is as grim as it can be. They, and their employers, or the teachers at the colleges and universities they attend, testify to the daily uncer- tainty, waste, mental strain, personal risk and eco- nomic vulnerability that go with a service that isn’t Many thousands of commuters, hundreds of businesses and institutions and the increasingly vulnerable economy of the whole city are being placed at growing risk, with the mainstay of mobil- ity across the metropole appearing to be even worse than it was even just a year ago. There have been promises and undertakings for a decade and more, enough to fill a book. Only in July, the commuter service’s region- al manager, Richard Walker, wrote in a letter to Weekend Argus that “we reassure the city of our commitment to continue to partner with them to improve the commuting experience of our custom- ers and urge the city to concretise its commitments with the urgency it deserves”. These partnerships are important – and, truth be told, Metrorail is subject to greater machina- tions (not least, massive fraud at rail agency Prasa, over which it has little control) – and the commit- ments are important, too. Unfortunately, in 2017, they lack conviction, be- cause the “commuting experience” of Metrorail’s “customers” no longer comes anywhere near to matching the jargon of “service”, but amounts to Until that changes, the costs will only rise, for all