Bus fleet expansion good for innovation, design

THE news that Zupco, the State-owned company that is the only realistic contender to provide a decent urban transport service for a middle-income country, is seeking 550 new buses through Zimbabwean firms, and that one major Zimbabwean manufacturer of buses in the past is now making new designs, are both signs that we are on the right track.

There used to be, under the two companies that were merged into Zupco during the 1980s, a fairly reasonable urban public transport service in the four largest cities that had contracted obligations to provide scheduled services on approved routes, regardless of whether the buses were full, and an obligation to boost the fleet in the morning and afternoon peak periods.

Zupco carried on with these services after the merger and buy-out of external investors, and was doing well until it could no longer get the fare rises it needed as inflation rates rose and so was unable to buy replacement buses as the workhorses it inherited wore out. So gradually it died.

The Second Republic did resuscitate the company and has been recapitalising it, basically by buying new buses and assigning these to Zupco operations, but we still have a long way to go with Zupco giving priority to rural routes and to the major requirement of ensuring that civil servants can get to and from work, fulfilling the promises made by the Government of the non-salary benefits.

We saw during the Covid-19 more intensive lockdowns what Zupco could do when it could assign more buses to normal urban routes, and could franchise major intercity bus companies to use their spare capacity, with intercity travel banned, to operate under Zupco control.

Now we are moving into new territory with the next planned expansion of the fleet, and although 550 buses sounds a lot we are probably talking about only about a fifth or a quarter of the numbers that will eventually be required.

But, on the other hand, it is important for a going concern to buy buses in stages, so that it is not suddenly faced with a bill in a few years to replace the entire fleet in a few months.

And it is here that Zupco can now start demanding more than just a supplier importing and selling a new bus that works fine in the original country of manufacture, but might not suit Zimbabwean conditions and Zimbabwean traffic demands.

A pure foreign design might not be able to take advantage of some of the extras Zimbabwean cities can offer, such as wide roads and rectangular grids which make longer buses possible.

Even when a supplier is importing buses, or better still is importing kits to assemble as buses, it is possible to make modifications. Zupco has already been operating a fleet of built-up imports and by now must have a good idea of where designs work well and where modifications would be desirable.

One obvious problem already seen is that cabin luggage racks are not suitable for support of standing passengers; they are needed on rural routes, but need to be replaced by railings on urban routes.

In fact dual purpose buses for long distance travel and short urban commuter hauls are very difficult to design, and in the end are unlikely to be ideal for either purpose.

There are other modifications that Zupco might like to insist on, concerning ground clearance, robustness and any other issues that have arisen in its operations of new designs on particular routes. When you want to buy 550 buses, even when these are broken down into batches for urban, intercity, electrical and minibuses, you can start discussing customer modifications without incurring high extra costs.

We would hope that some credit in the tender process, when it is launched, will give advantages to those who intend to at least assemble the buses in Zimbabwe, and perhaps go further and be manufacturing some of the parts and especially the cabins in Zimbabwe.

This will not only expand the Zimbabwean industrial base, it will also make it very easy to get Zupco customisation right without having to change what someone else has already made.

So in addition to normal tender checks on suppliers, Zupco might like to see some industrial capacity to back up the potential supplier.

Another resuscitated company is AVM Africa, which once, when it was a Lonrho subsidiary came to dominate the late colonial and early independence markets for buses taking a more than 90 percent market share, using its own designs and only importing the drive trains, wheels and the materials for the chassis and the body while doing the manufacturing in Msasa, Harare.

It went through troubles, losing a lot of its intercity market as passengers started demanding a different standard, and reacting too slowly to needed design changes for seats and the like, and losing its urban market as Zupco went through its own troubles.

Then the collapse of Lonrho its major shareholder did not help. But it is back and is thinking.

Its latest prototype is a highly-specialised urban bus, a pure urban bus, with 20 seats and room for 100 standing passengers. The smart Zimbabwean designer, who clearly has at least stood in bus terminuses at rush hour and hopefully used buses to get home, has given maximum priority to numbers and has shown other innovative ideas.

She clearly has seen what people will put up with when they just want to go home, and has tried to do something a lot better.

This sort of innovation needs to be nurtured and encouraged, but it also needs to be tried out in practice and needs feedback from passengers and users.

Her design will not be the first from AVM, and we hope other companies will also move into high-level innovation mode.

We think one way of testing prototypes would be the creation of a sort of test unit. The Ministries of Industry and Commerce and of Transport and Infrastructure Development could work out the necessary licensing arrangements for manufacturers so new innovative designs could be used on standard services.

Zupco will want to be involved, and in any case needs to assign routes, so it could ensure testing covered all urban uses and it could see how new designs would fit into urban operations.

As we move away from taking off-the-shelf designs that work in other countries but are not the best for Zimbabwe, and as we tap the vast potential of our own engineering and technology skills, we need to be able to try-out and test what they produce.

One huge advantage of local design is that this can be tweaked, quickly, during testing and prototype proving so that the final approved design is clearly just what customers want.

The rebuilding of Zupco opens a lot of opportunities and not just for Zupco. It also opens new horizons for some of our engineering companies, their best technical staff and their best design staff allowing us to make the jump far more quickly to the sort of innovative, smart and upper-middle class country that we all want.