Chairperson of the NCOP, hon Minister, hon members of the NCOP, and hon special guests, indeed, I would like to share with you the legacy that I found in KwaZulu-Natal, particularly in Durban, which the Minister had left behind when I visited KZN last week.
There were no traffic jams during peak hours and there were the initiatives that the Minister took in putting food on the table for rural people. These were some of the initiatives that he took under the Expanded Public Works Programme, EPWP.
I also found the promotion of public transport, instead of the use of private cars by the city of eThekwini under their public transport campaign, The Smart Way To Go; non-motorised transport promotion with the issuing of bicycles; road safety campaigns at public transport facilities; the launch of the Dial-a-Ride accessible transport for the disabled; a career expo on transport; and the issuing of free Durban People Mover passes per day.
I would like to thank all the municipalities in the country where, under the auspices of the South African Local Government Association, Salga, we promoted this as part of their budgets annually.
But what we find in South Africa at the moment is that sometimes in the remoteness of the Northern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal, and Limpopo, as well as Mpumalanga, unplanned settlements are intertwined with highways, and highways are cutting through unplanned settlements - they bisect them. Sir, 4x4s in our cities are never dirtied, but there are rusted bicycles, and also decades-old vehicles on our roads that need to provide the service. We in Salga have told ourselves that we are encouraging municipalities to do something about it.
The transport fraternity defines public transport as the provision of passenger transport services to the public for a fee. It includes buses, minibus taxis and rail for distances that are less than 200 km. I would like to appeal to the media not to call just any minibus which is in an accident a minibus taxi - please, do your research. It excludes air transport, metered taxis, tourist or charter services, and intercity long- distance buses and taxis.
For any public transport to be effective, it needs to service every resident within a kilometre of their place of residence. It also needs to operate for at least 12 to 15 hours a day. It must be affordable and regular. The current public transport system does not take care of the people who most need it; and it forces those who can afford it to use private vehicles.
The poor public transport system undermines people's basic human rights, because the majority of South Africans do not have access to reliable, affordable, pleasant and clean transport that runs on time, particularly in the rural areas. For them, it is difficult to access public services such as health services, schools, police stations, welfare services, and other life opportunities such as employment and business opportunities.
Statistics from the Department of Transport's National Household Survey of 2003 indicated that more than 75% had no access to a train station and nearly 40% did not have access to a bus service. Most of these people did not have a car and were virtually stranded.
Chairperson, another factor is that of crime and safety. Numerous people raised the issue of exposure to high levels of crime in their local areas and were worried about their own and their children's personal safety whilst both waiting for and using public transport. Safety concerns were raised about the largely unregulated minibus taxis that most people are forced to rely on, in the absence of regulated public transport services. Vehicles were identified as unsafe, both because of their poor physical condition and also because of driver behaviour. This is an opportunity where we can have a joint programme between municipalities and the other spheres to address this challenge.
Government is trying to address the lack of a proper transport network through legislation and the establishment of integrated public transport networks. However, the focus seems to be on infrastructure development, not the operation of public transport. Operation of public transport involves routes, schedules, times of operation, marketing, and communication with the public.
The relatively low-density spatial design patterns of South African settlements, combined with the general attitude of the public towards the use of public transport, means that the flagship public transport intervention, the bus rapid transit, BRT, system, will for some time be running at a low capacity, which means the cost per passenger will remain high. The services should therefore not be expected to be financially self- sustaining in the short to medium term. Municipalities should also not be expected to be the only government institutions that carry the burden of subsidising such services.
What we need is for the National Land Transport Act to be operationalised. As a country, we continue to invest in infrastructure that is aimed at supporting private vehicle use, for example, the expansion of the road network to accommodate more vehicles. Government needs to commit in word and practice to a policy direction where the key focus is on public transport. Funding should be focused on supporting this policy direction.
Any new transport initiative - whether community-based or mainstream services such as the BRT system - should not be monitored only in regard to passenger counts and the additional vehicle kilometres, but also in regard to social welfare criteria, such as those laid out in the principles for Batho Pele and the South African Millennium Development Goals.
Lastly, we should support community-level services that are urgently needed to supplement the main radial bus rapid transit route and new rail corridors that are being put in place. These should be routed to provide people in low-income communities with the maximum ready access to work, schools, colleges, medical centres, crches, shopping centres and places of worship. In order to achieve this, the capacity of the state at local and regional levels to regulate the taxi industry and integrate it into a multimodal system of public transport needs to be improved.
There also appears to be a case for offering fare subsidies to low-income groups who are currently spending a disproportionately large amount of their low income on transport costs - and we know that the apartheid racial divide on spatial settlements is the cause of this. This should form part of a wider package of subsidies that welfare recipients receive from government. I thank you. [Applause.]