Cape Town rail plan still not finalised, provincial legislature told
“We are not there yet” PRASA executive tells MPLs
The Service Level Plan between the City of Cape Town and the Passenger Rail Agency of SA, the first step in moving management of passenger rail to the City, has still not been finalised. Archive photo: Tariro Washinyira
- The Service Level Plan to move passenger rail management to the City of Cape Town has been years in the making.
- The plan, involving the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (PRASA) and the City of Cape Town, was announced as signed off in February.
- But the provincial legislature’s Standing Committee on Mobility was told on Friday that the plan is still not ready.
Members of the Western Cape provincial legislature were surprised to be told that the much-vaunted plan to shift passenger rail management from the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (PRASA) to the City of Cape Town has not been finalised.
In his presentation to the Standing Committee on Mobility on Friday, PRASA Western Cape regional manager Raymond Maseko said the Service Level Plan (SLP), which marks the first step toward the devolution of passenger rail in the metro to the City in terms of the Land Transport Act of 2009, was “not yet complete”. Maseko said a meeting was scheduled for 29 May to complete the plan’s terms of reference so it could be put into operation.
Cape Town Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis said in a speech in the city council on 5 December last year that he was “glad to announce” PRASA had signed the SLP “to improve Metrorail in the short-term”.
It was later discovered that City manager Lungelo Mbandazayo only signed the SLP on 21 February, with City Mayco member for Urban Mobility Rob Quintas saying “planning” was “underway” to implement it.
The SLP has already been years in the making. After delays on PRASA’s side, Hill-Lewis in 2023 threatened to declare an intergovernmental dispute and commuter activist organisation #UniteBehind instituted legal action to compel the parties to sign an agreement.
Most of Maseko’s presentation to the committee focused on the loss of rail corridors and all but seven of 124 railway stations in the metro during the Covid lockdown, and the efforts to recover from this.
This included the need to move thousands of people who had built homes on the central line’s rail reserve and on the railway line itself in Langa, Philippi, and Nyanga.
He said the first train to Chris Hani station, at the end of the central line, ran on 7 April this year, but it was a single line and they were working on getting the second, dual line operational. The central line branch to Kapteinsklip in Mitchell’s Plain still needed to be recovered.
Speaking on the SLP — yet to be implemented — Maseko said the City was the planning authority and would direct PRASA about how many passengers needed to be carried on transport corridors. PRASA would then indicate what it could support and what it would take to meet the target.
For instance, if 20,000 passengers needed to be carried per hour on the southern line, a train would have to run in each direction every three minutes. “We are not there yet,” said Maseko. (Currently, a train runs every 20 minutes during peak hours.)
He said the SLP also facilitated social housing developments around stations, such as the development at Goodwood station, which also helped protect the station and the surrounding line from vandalism or occupation.
“PRASA has land that can be developed by developers, at Retreat, at other stations, for student accommodation at Unibell (station). None of these are possible without working together with the City of Cape Town.”
Similarly, in planning for seamless intermodal public transport with a single ticketing system, he said PRASA needed to work with the provincial government, which managed public transport interchanges. An SLP with the province was being developed for this purpose.
Addressing the committee after making a formal request to do so, #UniteBehind founder Zackie Achmat said he was “shocked to hear” that some legal questions on the SLP were still being discussed.
Achmat said the reason there is an SLP is because #UniteBehind had taken PRASA to court. “We had to beg for it, from both PRASA and the City.” He said their efforts since 2017 were ignored until Hill-Lewis took office at the end of 2021.
He asked why there was no public participation on the SLP and requested Maseko provide the organisation with PRASA’s universal access policy so that people with disabilities could also use the train service with ease.
ANC committee member Benson Ngqentsu also questioned the lack of public participation in the drafting of the SLP.
Ngqentsu said it was “evident there’s an in-principle SLP and its rollout is underway”, but the plan was still “under construction”.
“Have stakeholders in the rail sector been meaningfully engaged? Has labour been engaged? What do the workers say?”
GOOD Party committee member Brett Herron said it seemed the SLP was a secret document. “I had to search everywhere for it and could not find it online.”
Herron said the plan was not published and it was not part of a public participation process. “I don’t understand the inability to share it with the public.”
He said he had nonetheless managed to get hold of a copy, but it made “very vague commitments” for PRASA and the City to work together, with no set targets or a plan to work towards achieving them.
He also said the agreement on creating an intermodal, single ticket transport system was formulated in 2015, and there was no apparent plan for universal access.
In a statement later published on Politicsweb, Herron said the SLP presentation was “theatrical bluster”.
“It’s not actually a plan at all,” he wrote, adding that the document, which had been “shrouded in secrecy” seemed to rather be a means to shield the City in litigation brought against it and PRASA by #UniteBehind and did not move the City any closer to managing the passenger rail service.
Quintas, who attended the meeting as an observer, said the City’s business cases for the three scenarios outlined in its own rail feasibility study were “near completion”, with the finishing touches being added “in a month or two”.
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