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This is an open letter to Patricia De Lille, Helen Zille, PRASA and Cape Metrorail, in the hope that at least one of you, and hopefully all of you, will do the job you’re supposed to and serve the people you should. Please don’t pass the buck around amongst yourselves. Please just take the responsibility which is yours, be accountable and DO something. Quickly.
For the last few weeks the rail commute on the Southern Line of Cape Town has been a nightmare. Apparently there is an “ongoing technical problem” between Kalk Bay and St James which has effectively reduced the rail line on the Southern Peninsula to a single track necessitating a “stop-go” system in which Metrorail tries to shuffle the trains like a bad magician.
Instead of what would seem the logical approach and alternating one train north one train south, whoever is randomly responsible for shuffling the stockyard deck applies the most haphazard system of letting two or three train go in one direction before allowing one to squeeze by in the other. This may be fine going north to Cape Town but causes mayhem going south to Simon’s Town because it results in too many trains being on not enough tracks.
The Metrofail solution is to stop the southbound train at Muizenberg, eject everyone from the train, and send the train back north. Crowds of frustrated passengers waiting in the cold evening sea-breeze then watch several other trains go north before finally, sometimes nearly an hour later, another - already overcrowded - train pitches up to squeeze even more aboard and schlep them southwards and homewards.
This train-jam adds anywhere between three quarters of an hour to two hours onto each commute, if we add the time spent waiting for trains to arrive in the first place. This is a massive waste of time and productivity of people who are constantly late for work or to collect children in the evening.
Instead of trains operating every 10 or so minutes at peak commuting times, commuters are forced to wait 30 to 40 minutes between trains, resulting in overcrowded trains stopping and many dangerous situations being created not only by people being forced to hang out the doors and onto the outside of the trains to get to work on time but also for hundreds of young school children getting caught up in the crush of this particular sardine run. It isn’t at all funny and the panic on some of these childrens’ faces sometimes, should be something Patricia, Helen and the ghosts at Metrorail and PRASA should be forced to see. What if these were your children? Of course they wouldn’t be because of your privileged positions none of your children use these trains.
As well as the very real dangers to body and limb caused by these human cattle trucks, every commute sees commuters jostle for standing space and to get on and off. Tempers flare and needless aggression is stimulated all because PRASA and Metrorail can’t do their jobs.
This disaster-in-waiting affects tens of thousands of Southern Peninsula Capetonians every single day. Which entity is going to be accountable when the inevitable happens and people fall from the trains and die. Who will console and compensate the parents of a child who is crushed or bumped from a moving train?
All commuters hear on the audio system is that “there is an ongoing technical problem between Kalk Bay and St James”. Well, if there is an ongoing technical problem between Kalk Bay and St James, why the hell haven’t people been working around the clock to fix the damn technical problem?
This is your city Patricia, this is your province Helen, these are your trains and tracks PRASA, this is your operation Metrorail. So why the hell don’t any of you earn your gravy-train salaries for once and damn-well do something?
