• A R1.9-trillion plan to fix South Africa’s rail system was released by Transport Minister Barbara Creecy last week.
• One of the plan’s priorities is to devolve urban passenger rail to metropolitan municipalities.
• Part of the plan is to reconfigure the Metrorail network, add new lines, and allow concessions to private operators.

The City of Cape Town’s push to manage passenger rail within the metropole received its strongest support yet from the national Department of Transport, with the launch of the draft National Rail Master Plan on 23 April, GroundUp reports.

The 25-year rail master plan aims to “reposition rail as a national asset serving broader economic and social goals”.

It covers freight, long-distance and urban passenger rail, the management of the rail network, stations, security, financing, property and related assets.

Priority is given to the immediate recovery of freight rail over the next five years.

Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (Prasa) urban rail networks (Metrorail) in Gauteng, eThekwini and Cape Town are listed as the second priority, with their recovery and densification through new lines and interchange hubs given a 10-year timeline.

This involves reforming Prasa, which currently runs Metrorail, including the “future devolution of urban rail to municipalities, guided by a national devolution strategy”.

It is this aspect that Cape Town Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis has “welcomed”.

One of the most important Metrorail interventions is reconfiguring and expanding the existing rail network to enable all lines to operate independently, with trains running at optimal frequency.

New lines within the three existing metro networks are proposed in order to improve access to townships, although the new configurations for Gauteng and eThekwini have “not yet been subjected to detailed demand modelling and therefore remain indicative at this stage”.

They will still be refined.

The plan for Cape Town is largely taken from the City’s modelling in which rail is reinstated as the backbone of commuter transport.

Plan for Cape Metrorail

For Cape Town, which is the only metro to have developed a plan for managing Metrorail, part of this modelling involves looking at which lines had the most demand.

The result is that Nyanga, Heathfield, Maitland and Kentemade (near Century City) will be developed as interchange hubs where commuters travelling to a destination on a line which has a lower passenger demand, would change trains.

For instance, the southern line from Cape Town to Simon’s Town has a lower passenger demand than the Cape Flats line from Cape Town to Heathfield.

The plan is to make the current Cape Flats line the main line and have it run through Ndabeni to Kentemade, with a future extension through Century City to Bloubergstrand, and possibly to Atlantis.

The workforce commuting between the industrial and business areas of Ndabeni and Century City and the residential areas of the Cape Flats and southern suburbs would then have a direct line.

But passengers travelling between the city centre and stations south of Steenberg would have to change at Heathfield.

Each of these lines would operate independently without intersecting or sharing with other lines.

This would mean the only constraint to the number of trains on the line would be the signalling system, with shared infrastructure no longer playing a role.

Theoretically, a train could run on these main lines every three minutes and could be run on a concession by private operators.

The reconfigured network would result in an almost 20% decrease in average trip length, reduce road congestion, lower carbon emissions, and expand access to affordable transport – particularly for lower-income households.

City of Cape Town studies calculated that lower-income households would save about R932 million a year if Metrorail were working optimally within an integrated transport system.

City of Cape Town responds

“We welcome government’s renewed commitment to rail devolution in this national masterplan,” Hill-Lewis said on Tuesday.

But, he said, the rail plan did not give time frames for the devolution and he called on Minister of Transport Barbara Creecy to finalise the National Rail Bill and devolution strategy “as soon as possible”.

He said the City would call for “clear and urgent deadlines” as Cape Town was ready to be the first municipality “to run its local trains”.

“In time, we want to see Capetonians using just one ticket to hop from trains to MyCiTi buses and other public transport.”

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He said the City’s rail business plan, which was used to inform aspects of the master plan, explored nine devolution scenarios, of which three were deemed viable.

These viable options involved the City managing the rail services, associated assets, and infrastructure.

This would include “the participation of the private sector operating services on a contractual or comprehensive concession basis”.

Devolution of rail to the City would require funding from the national government, with no cross-subsidisation of rail from the City’s rates base, Mayco member for urban mobility Rob Quintas said.

“The City also needs to have authority over fare-setting, access to long-term national grant-funding, and to generate local revenue through public-private partnerships and commercialisation,” he added.

An investment SA cannot afford not to make

In order for the master plan to be implemented, R1.9 trillion in capital expenditure is needed over 10 years.

A large portion of this “will have to be attracted from private investors”.

The rail plan states that given the extent of corruption in the rail sector, “it should be expected that such investors would require exceptional measures to reduce their investment risks to a tolerable level”.

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But it is an investment the country cannot afford not to make.

The rail plan states that an independent study by the Gain Group found the economy was losing R276 billion a year due to South Africa’s “rail challenges”.

Part of this loss is R177 billion in exports that were not realised, and foreign exchange that was not created.

The additional R99 billion loss is from inefficiencies of freight that “should have been moved on rail but was moved on road at higher cost to the economy”.

Additionally, economic benefit modelling showed every R1 million invested in rail resulted in a R4.35-million increase in GDP, along with the creation of eight full-time equivalent jobs and a R4.38-million increase in household income.

“Over the projected investment cycle, this equates to more than R2.1 trillion in direct GDP contribution and more than 7.2 million employment opportunities across the construction and operational phases.”

There are also indirect savings from reduced congestion, reduced carbon emissions, noise, and policing, adding up to about R13 billion a year.