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When you love the environment, it is likely that you are a fan of public transport, walking, cycling etc. But in most instances you are challenged with the difficulties of using these modes of transport.
Let us talk public transport facilities in our beautiful South Africa. A lot of people are not able to afford cars and have only an option of public transport, walking or cycling. But these modes of transport are not adequately provided for.
With all these challenges, I am asking myself, who is responsible for planning the Public Transport system? This question comes everyday in my mind because of the daily experiences. To be specific I will base this to the Bellville taxi rank in Cape Town. It was in the afternoon, during peak hours when I arrived at the taxi rank. It is a well located taxi rank in the city of Bellville but I found one big problem there.
I stood close to the exit/ entrance point of the taxi rank for about 30 minutes. There was a long queue of taxis all waiting to go out to their destinations. The challenge is/ was that all of those taxis waited to use one same exit; imagine hundreds of taxis within the rush hour time. For the period that I waited there, I noticed that it took each taxi approximately 20 minutes to get out of the taxi rank. Yooh…… Additional to this there is still time to travel from the taxi rank to different destinations. This is a problem in public transport. But let’s put our focus to the time it took each taxi to move out of the taxi rank, 20 minutes.
Is this delay due to the nature of peak hour or poor planning? There might be different views to that but I believe it is because someone did not do his/ her work properly (poor planning). Our city planners have a problem of planning what they like not what the people want. How many public transport facilities (taxi ranks) today are not used due to this poor planning? This is “poverty of a mind and ideas” which needs to be addressed with urgency.
You have a taxi rank (Bellville) where hundreds of taxis are sharing one exit. Passengers sit in the taxi for about 20 minutes just to get out of the taxi rank. This is additional to the time they would travel to their destination, where the taxis are still going to share the road space with private cars. Where are people oriented planners in the transport spaces? We need people who understand public transport not as “parcel” of the transport system but as an enabler of economic growth.
Let our city officials understand the role of the taxi industry from all aspects, because the industry is here to stay. We need to work on integrating it to the entire Public transport system. We need to plan the facilities that will eliminate unnecessary delays in the system.
Bellville Taxi Rank needs more exit points to achieve efficiency; that is how people are attracted to public transport. People need to be moved, but in our case we are moving vehicles. We are not going to achieve the shift from private cars toward public transport when we take the design of public transport facilities for granted.
Let us get the right people to do the right work.
