Fix railways, our roads become congested during the holidays
South Africa sees a lot of accidents this time, with lives lost
Another festive season is upon us and the working class is planning to travel home. For a reader that is unfamiliar with the SA context, the months of December and January are dedicated for family time by black labour.
This oppressed group of people come from the country’s rural outskirts and spend more than 90% of their time in a year as urban migrants searching for a living. This is the geographic and racial legacy of apartheid planning in SA.
As a result, when this huge number of the population goes home in December using minibus taxis, our roads become congested with traffic, which leads to horrific accidents. Before Covid-19 hit SA, the 2018 report on Global Status Report on Road Safety by the World Health Organisation showed that SA is hitting above the world average when it comes to road fatalities and it is the highest in Africa.
This comes as no surprise for us as we know that the department of transport publishes statistics annually showing that SA gets to have a high rate of road accidents that lead to death during the holiday season. The December period and Easter are the leading windows of these numbers.
Many awareness campaigns have been driven by government and the NGO sector to try to address this problem, such as the annual “Arrive Alive” campaign by government.
Many bodies and activists have also called for the ban of alcohol, stricter regulations on alcohol sales and car roadworthy assessments. Some have also placed blame on the corruption taking place in the traffic department where bribes are paid for people to pass their licence despite being poor, careless drivers.
Of course, these campaigns are useful, and they have raised awareness – but the problem does not seem to go away. Road deaths continue to multiply during the holiday season and these awareness campaigns have since become routine.
The one key area that people are ignoring is that we are so focused on the road problem and we end up forgetting that we were once a country that had a strong railway culture.
People used trains to travel between Johannesburg and their rural homes in Eastern Cape, Free State, KZN and the neighbouring countries.
These trains were safe, cheap, reliable and were hardly involved in accidents. Workers used them to commute between township and their workplaces.
The culture of using taxis and buses came later, when apartheid was beginning to decline. The post-1994 period opened up the country to international markets where neoliberalism brought in a consumption culture of private, small luxury vehicles and commercial, small taxis and buses.
State failure accelerated this problem. Corruption destroyed the entire railway system that was at its peak in the 1960s. This collapsed the economy; it destroyed what would have been a worldclass interconnected public transport network for SA.
By extension, the collapse of the railway translated into a massive growth of the taxi industry. This unregulated sector brought with it elements of preciousness, criminality, monopolies and violent vigilantes whom have now all captured our transport governance system.
When new mayors with urban transformation visions across SA try to implement railway interventions in their cities and town, they are met with violence and resistance by the taxi industry.
As a result, the whole country is now trapped into road usage and taxis because of this violence. Again, state failure has weakened the capacity of the police to help and protect citizens and innovative businesses from taking the roads back from criminals. Today, every Uber or Bolt driver that tries to make a living through airport and bus stop passengers gets killed by the taxi industry.
To prevent road deaths in December, to restore our public transport to worldclass standards and offer a social wage relief to our migrant labourers, government needs to step up and begin to think in a more transformative terms.
It needs to do its job by reopening and rebuilding more railway train systems .