Chairperson, Minister Ndebele, Chairperson of the Portfolio Committee on Transport, Ruth Bhengu, MECs for Transport and the heads of departments present, the mayor, who is the chairperson of Salga, members of mayoral committees, MMCs from cities in charge of transport, chairpersons and chief executive officers from the family of transport entities that fall under this Transport budget, Director-General Mpumi Mpofu, colleagues from the Department of Transport, a range of stakeholders, including the minibus sector, commuter organisations, students from transport institutions, welcome. It's good to see you, a new generation of transport champions ... [Applause.] ... and other friends who are here on the study tour from different institutions. Colleagues and friends, in a short speech it is very difficult to do justice to this vast field that is covered by our budget, by the Department of Transport and its many agencies, but also by cities and provinces.
There are many unsung and unreported achievements that we have seen over the last period. For instance, the Civil Aviation Authority reports to us that South African air carriers have earned an excellent reputation, particularly in transporting food aids to distressed parts of the world, in the Middle East, the horn of Africa, and so on. Apparently, the World Food Programme, for instance, insists on using South African air transporters to get them to these places, because of their safety record. [Applause.]
We have the Air Traffic Navigation Services, an excellent agency falling under our budget. They are training air traffic controllers throughout our continent and in parts of the Middle East. And as tragic stories of the recent past have confirmed, this is really an important function. We are servicing not just our own air traffic needs and requirements, but those of the continent and many other Third World countries.
Our air traffic navigation services cover, apparently, one tenth of the earth space in their activities, up into Africa, halfway across the Atlantic to Brazil, up the Indian Ocean and all the way down to the South Pole. We don't notice them, but they are there and they are doing a wonderful job. [Applause.]
We have a new Railway Safety Regulator. It is a few years old. I didn't realise, hon Farrow and hon Khunou, when we were busy with the legislation that it was a pioneer as a safety regulator on the African continent, but, indeed, a pioneer in many respects, globally. I didn't realise that there are very few rail safety regulators in the world. They have begun to work. They have begun to acquire teeth, and what they have told us, which is interesting and alarming, but important to know, is that over the last two years some R2,5 billion direct costs, not other costs as a results of loss of business, have been incurred on the rail system due to operational weaknesses.
There are many other stories which one doesn't have time to narrate. Like other speakers, I want to focus on what naturally, as a politician, is our core constituency, and that is public transport.
As South Africa, we are on the threshold of a major transformation in public transport. Of course, this is a transformation that won't come all at once, everywhere. It won't happen simultaneously in every place, and it will, necessarily, have to be incremental in character, but, make no mistake, it is under way. It is being spurred on partly by government's commitment to making sure that the key legacy that we will derive from hosting the 2010 Fifa World Cup final, will lay down a public legacy of public transport for future generations.
It is also being assisted, this focus on public transport, by growing awareness that, despite many important achievements over the first 15 years of democracy in South Africa, there are several key factors in our society that seem to continuously reproduce gendered, class and racialised inequality and underdevelopment. And one of these, which actively does this, perhaps the most important of these, is the spatial arrangement of our society; the way in which space, where you live, where you are located and, therefore, who you are likely to be in terms of class, gender and race, impacts dramatically on the cost in time and aggravation in money that it takes you to access work, education and other basic constitutional and democratic rights. This reality continues to lie at the heart of the reproduction of gross inequalities in our society, which are often very racialised. [Applause.]
In 2004, the SA Cities Network State of the Cities Report noted the obvious, "Apartheid cities have unusual spatial contradictions". It said "apartheid cities", but it was talking about the reality of our cities, towns and countrysides, still today. On the one hand, they are sprawling suburban realities with density levels that make it very difficult to sustain public transport. That is one of the problems and difficulties. It's very easy to say to Metrorail, become self-sustainable, but it is difficult for public transport to be self-sustainable without major subsidies, simply because of the design of our cities and low density levels in our sprawling suburbs. On the other hand, there is relatively high density of populous townships and informal settlements that are pushed on to the peripheries of our towns and cities.
Apartheid spatial planning was not only about the exclusion of the black majority of South Africans from rights, resources and wealth, it was also, simultaneously, about the inclusion on inferior terms of this majority as commuting labourers into white-owned places of work. This pattern of exclusion, but also simultaneous inferior inclusion, played itself out, not just within the city environment and town environment, but also in the relationship between our towns and cities and rural areas which were dormitory reserves and Bantustans.
The black majority was held far enough away to be containable, but close enough to be useful to a white minority. The social, economic and spatial realities set in place by decades of apartheid and earlier forms of colonial segregation, are now not easy to unravel, as we have discovered over the last 15 years. We can't go on blaming apartheid, of course, but at the same time it is a very difficult legacy to transform.
What was once actively planned under apartheid is now often reproduced and compounded by so-called free-market forces, in particular property prices. One of the key political commitments of the new democratically elected government back in 1994, was to roll out one million low-cost houses within five years, and we have remarkably achieved that. There are now over three million low-cost houses. But in order to meet those targets with the budget at hand, of course, we went to where the land was cheaper, again in the same dormitory locations, far away from places of work, resources and institutions. Access, mobility and inequalities of the poor have often been deepened. Unintentionally, of course, but deepened, nonetheless.
To understand, therefore, our present challenges in regard to public transport, it is necessary to understand these embedded spatial legacies that we are dealing with, and the problems that they constantly reproduce. We cannot solve public transport problems by way of transport alone. I thought this was the point that the hon Khunou was making nicely, that there need to be resources, institutions and facilities where people live, and not somewhere else, so that they have to travel long distances.
This underlines the importance of shifts that we have made within Cabinet. We are now calling the former Department of Housing the Department of Human Settlements to underline that what we want to do is to change the nature of communities from just rows of houses for the poor to human settlements. We need, as a department, to work very closely with the Human Settlements department. We also need to insist that one of the key mandates of the new Planning Commission is to focus on spatial transformation, to democratise South Africa's space, to deracialise South Africa's space. That is something that we have not yet achieved in the last 15 years.
However, the flipside is also true, that while we can't solve these problems through transport, transport is also a key catalyser for transforming the spatial realities of South Africa, particularly public transport. Shifting away from an overemphasis on the sterile environment of freeways dominated by car congestion to public transport, nonmotorised pedestrian and bike ways, and so forth, along which businesses, mixed- income settlements can take root, is a core component of nation-building. It is not just a nice-to-have, it's the way we build a new and deracialised South Africa. Efficient and reliable public transport used by rich and poor alike fosters a sense of solidarity and national unity in a way that tens of thousands of individual cars on a congested freeway never can.
Interestingly, we got a glimpse of the possibilities of the way in which public transport and public transport infrastructure and nonmotorised pedestrian ways can begin to democratise our society in the last three weeks with the hosting of the Confederations Cup. Now, I would like to turn to this.
Yesterday, we held an extended Ministers and Members of the Executive Council, Minmec, meeting, which included colleagues from our transport entities as well as colleagues from host cities. A key agenda item was to critically review transport arrangements during the Confederations Cup in the last few weeks. Colleagues will be aware that the Fifa President gave us a good, but not perfect seven out of 10 rating for our hosting. In particular, transport and accommodation were singled out as challenges, and we agree. Indeed, a number of transport problems were encountered in the last weeks and clearly there are lessons to be learned.
Some cities were less effective than others in their planning and preparations, and this showed up in heavy congestion during match days. Hon Khunou and hon Farrow, who were with me in the previous Portfolio Committee on Transport, will not be surprised to hear that Rustenburg was a key culpable entity in this regard. When we, as a committee, went to look at Rustenburg in the previous Parliament, we were deeply concerned about their state of readiness, and the rude way in which they treated us, to be honest. Again, not surprisingly, we encountered problems there. Therefore, what we said coming out of that Minmec is that cities, where there is an apparent lack of capacity, will require dedicated hands-on attention from the national and provincial spheres; and we are determined to do it. [Applause.]
In most of the host cities, the key approach to transporting people to and from stadiums was based on the park-and-ride principle. "Park your car and take a taxi-shuttle to the stadium." Generally this approach worked relatively well, but there were a number of glitches. Initially there was poor co-operation and a lack of shared information between transport officials, traffic officials and the police. There were different chains of command; cars and shuttles were often given conflicting directions.
The training of minibus operators on the shuttles appears also to have sometimes been inadequate. There was at least one report, which I think other members would have seen as well, of a Gauride shuttle getting lost on the way from Johannesburg to a Pretoria venue.
But, of course, these negative things need to be counterbalanced with many favourable reports which we have also received about the politeness of drivers, about the sense of general safety that even suburban fans, whites in some cases, travelling with their young families, experienced on their way to matches, and a sense of being part of South Africa, in the shuttles and in the park-and-ride facilities. At least one letter writer to a newspaper, clearly an avid soccer fan, noted from first-hand experience a distinct improvement over the course of the six different matches that he attended in the park-and-ride system.
If transportation to stadiums sometimes proved complex, an even stickier problem occurred after matches. This was always going to be the tougher challenge. Fans arrive at a stadium over a two or three hour period - not South African fans, but, nonetheless, that's the idea that they should arrive two to three hours before - and this is more or less manageable, this kind of trickle-in to a stadium, with a fleet of minibus shuttles. But fans leave the stadium all in one go. As a result fans often experience long delays or even difficulties in finding where their shuttles to their respective park-and-ride facilities are located. This is partly attributable to poor or nonexistent signage.
I know the transport family has been accused of this. When we tried to check back on what the problem was, we found that one of the problems - I don't want to displace the problems entirely - was that Fifa, which is very authoritarian, would not allow us to put up any signage to assist people to find their way to their respective shuttles. That is something that we will take up with them very sharply. We will thank them for their seven out of 10; we will agree with them that there were transport problems, but we will say that they also need to help us to provide effective transport for 2010.
There were other problems which were identified, including ineffective training and, in some cases, very low morale amongst volunteers at the park- and-ride facilities. Indeed, we are reviewing the wisdom of using volunteers, particularly in the transport environment for 2010.
Perhaps the biggest lesson, which has already been referred to by Minister Ndebele, we have learnt from the Confederations Cup is the imperative of having an effective, single command centre combining transport, traffic and security in one chain of command. [Applause.] That needs to be replicated at the local level. At a park-and-ride facility, at a stadium precinct, at the host city level, someone working, of course, with the team needs to be in charge of the totality of operations, and they need to be contactable and answerable to a command centre above them, and also have the ability to command resources below them.
An assessment of the Confederations Cup hosting would be incomplete without noting one of the most positive but largely unsung successes on the transport front. This was the critical role that our Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa, Prasa, which used to be called the Rail Commuter Corporation, Metrorail, played. Prasa moved some 40 000 people to matches during the weeks of the Confederations Cup. It was able to attract not just its traditional Metrorail customers, but also higher income nontraditional customers. Some were using rail transport for the first time ever in their lives.
Prasa ran rail services from Johannesburg to Rustenburg on match days, and from Johannesburg to Bloemfontein. In the latter case, they transported 3 000 fans from Johannesburg to Bloemfontein for the South Africa-Spain match. These were on routes that have not operated for a long while. Everything, from all the reports we got, went without a hitch. A lot of people fell in love with rail public transport, which is fantastic.
There were also 28 train sets in operation between the Coca Cola, or Ellis Park, and Loftus Versfeld stadiums. The park-and-ride principle was also applied on the trains. There were parking facilities adjacent to train stations and fans were able to park, take a ride on the train and disembark at the newly refurbished, wonderful Doornfontein Station, a two-minute walk to Ellis Park and the Rissik Station next to Loftus Versfeld Stadium, and that is something we will replicate on a larger scale, where possible, with all the stadiums for 2010.
What can we learn from this? Our trains have a passenger capacity of between 2 000 and 2 500. They are mass-movers. And this is why they, trains and rail, along with other mass-movers like our prospective Bus Rapid Transit systems and other Integrated Public Transport Network systems, need to provide the backbone for public transport mobility for 2010. And this is why it is so important that we move rapidly to the implementation of at least the first phases of these new mass movement systems, not at the expense of affected minibus operators, but through their effectiveness.
Towards the end of yesterday's Minmec assessment of the Confederations Cup, my colleague, Western Cape Transport MEC, Mr Robin Carlisle, eloquently summarised what I think many of us felt. He said that "we have crossed the threshold" - I hope you will forgive me for quoting you - "from asking the question of 2010, how bad will 2010 transport be? To asking a new question, how good can we make it?" This was a wonderful way of putting what I think was a consensus amongst us. [Applause.]
As we ask that question, we also need to bear in mind that public transport for 2010 is not just about 2010. It is about developing the beginning of decent, affordable, accessible public transport for the great majority of South Africans. And that, I believe, is what lies at the heart of this budget which is presented to Parliament today. Thank you. [Applause.]