Traffic is boosting City Bowl prices

GONE are the days when Capetonians laughed at Joburgers for having to spend two hours in traffic to get to nearby Pretoria. Traffic congestion in Cape Town has become so bad that many people working in town spend that amount of time, if not more, in the traffic getting to and from work daily from the West Coast and southern suburbs, if they leave in traffic peak hours. And motorists have noticed the peak hours are getting longer. This increased congestion is one of the many factors pushing up the demand for property close to the city centre, say the experts. Cape Town is, in fact, South Africa’s most congested city. Not only that, it is the 48th most congested city in the world, according to last year’s TomTom Traffic Index. It is so bad that next week a strategy proposing carpooling, public transport and parking incentives to disrupt regular peak hours, will be presented to the City of Cape Town. “With Cape Town’s increasingly congested road network there is no doubt that the value of property in the City Bowl will keep rising,” says Sue Alison of Lew Geffen Sotheby’s International Realty. To this end suburbs such as Vredehoek and the Atlantic seaboard that offer the “live-play-work” option and as little “car-time” as possible are most sought after. “Cape Town is, in part, a victim of its own success,” says Dr Lisa Kane, honorary research associate at UCT’s Centre for Transport Studies. “Gone are the days of Cape Town being seen as a fishing village – it now has the issues global cities have.” For example, data for London in the 1960s shows a morning and an afternoon peak. “As the city has become more congested there are now 12-hour-long peaks. It is a reality of most urban centres. Cape Town has been living in a bubble up to now.” Kane adds that the trend of property prices rising exponentially close to commercial centres is also a worldwide trend – the congestion is such that people want to move closer to work to avoid it. Kane says the congestion is partly to do with Cape Town’s geography, in that there are few arteries bringing people into the central city. Another factor is that historically Cape Town followed a US model of investing in high speed roads rather than public transport. Apartheid-era planning, putting poorer people at the edge of the city, intensified that trend.