Sarah Truen

Late last year I had a project which required a number of meetings at the National Treasury building in Vermeulen Street. As I live in Johannesburg, it made sense to take the Gautrain to these meetings – the Gautrain bus stop is just outside Treasury, so it should be pretty convenient.

In practice, the commute was distinctly less than pleasant. Catching the bus from the station to Treasury was usually pretty simple, but waiting for the bus perched on the broken bench at the bus stop in Andries Street was another thing entirely. My personal worst was a wait of around an hour – another day, I managed to walk from Treasury back to the Gautrain station without a bus going past me.

During all of this, I certainly had a lot of time to think and observe. And what I observed was that downtown Pretoria has loads and loads of buses and taxis. While I waited or walked, a vast amount of public transportation went past me. The problem was that I had no way of knowing where it was going, short of flagging it down and asking the driver, and no guarantee that I would be able to pay for it if it was going in the right direction (given that my Gautrain gold card only works for the Gautrain system).

Transport systems are an example of network economies. As such, the value and efficiency of the system increases as the size and volume of the network increases. The Pretoria bus system is much more attractive to me as a commuter if I know where all the buses are going, and am able to use them all, than if I have to wait an hour for a specific dedicated bus. The system works even better if all the buses are centred on a small number of hubs – that way, if you can find a bus going to the nearest hub, you know you have a good chance of quickly finding a bus going to your chosen destination once you get there. Moreover, the better the system works, the more people are likely to use it, which means that it gets easier to cover the cost of the system.

None of these principles seems to have been put in place in the Pretoria bus system. Instead, my time spent waiting in Andries Street suggested to me that Pretoria has a large number of very small, separately managed public bus systems. In which case, there is room for enormous improvement in the quality and efficiency of the public transport system simply by integrating the bus networks. I for one will be watching this policy environment with some interest going forward.