Introducing Moving South Africa

What is Moving South Africa - The Action Agenda

A strategy for the customers of transport

Moving South Africa - the Action Agenda is the National Department of Transport’s (NDoT) 20-year strategic framework for the transport sector. For the first time in the history of this nation, government has developed a framework which integrates all parts of transport into a common vision and plan for action.

Moving South Africa is ground-breaking in another respect. It is the first time that the needs of South African transport customers have been placed at the heart of the decision-making process. For most of our history, government transport policy has taken a modal view of the sector, concentrating its efforts on what is good for operators and the interests of the white minority. As a consequence, the vast majority of South African transport customers have in the past been ignored and under-served by both government and private firms. There has been a lack of research and analysis into the needs of specific customer segments or groups. Furthermore, government and operator actions have tended to disempower customers - especially passengers - who are, with few exceptions, weakly organised.

All this changes with Moving South Africa. This is a strategic framework to deliver sustainably against the needs of customers and the nation.

A Vision and Strategic framework for the entire transport sector

This Action Agenda applies to the entire transport sector. Built on a foundation which maps out how the needs of the nation, the economy and the people will change and develop over the next 20 years, the Action Agenda locates the future vision for transport within a strategic view of the future of our Nation. It provides a strategic framework to guide the actions of different transport sector role-players in the long run. It establishes the basis for partnerships between role-players to upgrade transport services over the next 20 years.

Moving South Africa – the Action Agenda does all these things on the basis of having made choices about where to focus limited resources. This is where the Action Agenda provides the transition from the White Paper on National Transport Policy of 1996 to delivery on the ground. Where both government and customer resources are limited, and where there is a vast range of diverse national and customer needs to be met, we do not have the luxury of being all things to all people. The Action Agenda has prioritised customer and national goals and set in place the foundations for a dramatic and fundamental move towards delivering against those very needs.

Whilst the Action Agenda makes clear choices, and sets a vision for the entire transport sector, it is a strategic framework as opposed to a detailed plan. It defines the challenges and the targets that must be achieved by government, firms and other delivery agencies in partnership. In so doing, it clearly allocates roles and responsibilities to each of these in a manner consistent with the principles of the White Paper. Service providers and individual firms have wide latitude to make firm-level strategic and tactical choices in providing services to customers, within the broad parameters of the transport vision and the regulatory environment.

A product of a partnership

The Moving South Africa process started out from, and is firmly based on, the objectives set out in the highly consultative White Paper of 1996. It was co-managed from June 1997 until September 1998 by a 63-member Steering Committee representative of government, the private sector, customers and labour. It is the product of an intensive and participatory research effort coupled with detailed consultations with, amongst others, the Steering Committee, government Ministers and departments and the broad transport fraternity, achieved through interviews, focus-group discussions and plenary sessions around the country.

In addition, a draft report entitled ‘Moving South Africa - Towards a Transport Strategy for 2020’ produced by the Moving South Africa project team was released for six months of public comment in September 1998. The NDoT subjected this report to its own internal evaluation process, received numerous written comments and heard feedback from delegates at plenary sessions around the country.

This book – ‘Moving South Africa - the Action Agenda’ – represents the decision of the Minister and Department of Transport, arrived at after considering the submissions of stakeholders and carefully listening to the debate following the release of the draft discussion document. It is therefore a vision and a strategic framework that belongs to us all.

The Action Agenda is a beginning

This Action Agenda is not the end of the Moving South Africa process. It is just the beginning. Throughout this book we articulate areas in which further work is required. But we are also deeply aware that the real strength of the strategy will emerge as it is refined and developed out of the experience of its implementation. To this end we see the partnership which was built through the process of developing the Action Agenda as a dynamic that must be taken forward into the future. Moving South Africa can therefore never be a final product. It is a vision and a framework that must continue to grow and develop. In the final section dealing with the way forward we set out our view of the process and the mechanisms through which we intend consolidating the Moving South Africa partnership.

Sidebar 1:

This ‘Action Agenda’ and the draft ‘Towards a Transport Strategy for 2020’ report

The work of the 14-month MSA project formed the basis for this Action Agenda. The project team (starting from the White Paper vision) laid out its research findings and strategy recommendations in the draft Towards a Transport Strategy for 2020 report, which was released for public comment in September 1998. This Action Agenda represents the Minister’s and NDoT’s decision on the strategic framework. It details the strategic framework around which the NDoT will facilitate alignment by stakeholders in the implementation of the strategy. This Action Agenda does not repeat the detailed data and analysis found in the draft Towards a Transport Strategy for 2020. Some of the data is summarised to provide a context for strategic choices, but readers should refer to the earlier draft for the detail regarding gaps and current system performance. Thus the focus of this Action Agenda is to clearly state the 20-year vision for transport, to specify the necessary first steps on how to get there, and to establish broad targets in order to allow all stakeholders to monitor progress along the way.

As already detailed above, the process of consultation and debate following the release of the draft Towards a Transport Strategy for 2020 has greatly enriched the product of Moving South Africa. There are instances therefore where the original recommendations by the project team have been further developed or amended by the NDoT. In order to assist the reader in working with the two documents together, the following summary of changes or amendments to the strategy is presented.

• In the first instance there has been an attempt to emphasise more sharply the vision for transport and its various component parts over the next 20-years.
• In some areas (e.g. the emphasis on consolidation in core freight corridors and the need to specifically serve disabled customers) there have been changes to, or shifts of, emphasis in the draft recommendations of September 1998. These changes, we feel, have both strengthened the strategy and begun to generate the necessary consensus from key stakeholders.
• In other areas where broad agreement already existed with relevant stakeholders (e.g. the strategy for urban passengers), we received clear signals to emphasise certain critical requirements (e.g. a stable and consistent source of funding and sustainable enforcement) that must be in place for successful implementation.
• In two areas of the strategy – the strategy for ports and certain elements of managing private car usage in urban areas – the debate has not shown a high degree of consensus. In both cases we have taken the view that consensus should not be forced. It is important that in these cases the appropriate balance between what appear to be competing national objectives should be determined by further debate, supported by targeted data analysis. In both cases we reassert the need for a strategic choice, and present the strategic options around which consensus still has to be generated. We have however narrowed down the dimensions around which choices need to be made, and have asserted a choice with regard to the need to focus resources, in order to avoid a strategic vacuum whilst the debate continues.
• Where relevant, this Agenda also highlights the need for more and/or better data and further research to inform an explicit strategy (e.g. rural passenger transport).

Methodology of the Moving South Africa Project

The MSA project broke new ground, not only for the transport sector, but also as a strategy development process by government in South Africa. At the outset it was agreed with stakeholders that the process and methodology to be employed would be focused on developing a framework for action and would be data-driven to ensure that our decisions are based on facts, and not on opinions or emotions. The original research and strategy development process ran for 14 months between June 1997 and September 1998. This process was organised into five phases as set out in Figure 1. Starting with national and customer goals and objectives, the Moving South Africa (MSA) project team measured the current transport system’s ability to meet those goals now and in the future. Based on this analysis of ‘gaps’ in the system, the process identified the major strategic challenges, and then using appropriate international best-practice and detailed data analysis, developed a set of strategic options to address these challenges. It then became necessary for the NDoT, assisted by stakeholders, to determine the particular option to pursue as its strategy. The Action Agenda is the result of this process. Throughout this process, we were guided by a set of principles aimed at ensuring that the product which emerged belongs to all who participated in its development. These principles required the strategy to be: Focused: The project could not examine every issue in transport, but had to focus on the key long-term strategic issues facing South Africa. Data Driven: The analyses, conclusions, and strategy were based on hard data, not opinion. Moving South Africa expended significant effort to gather the data required to give the project a firm grounding, and additional effort to ensure that as many participants as possible agreed with the baseline data. Consultative: As described above, the project made every effort to be as inclusive and consultative as possible, to ensure a broad range of opinions in guiding the strategy formulation process. Transparent: To the greatest extent possible, the project operated transparently, open to scrutiny from all members of the public. The exceptions occurred when some operators only provided critical data under the condition of confidentiality. Capacity Building: An integral objective of the project was to build human capacity, both at the level of the Steering Committee and within the Department itself. The capacity building goal entailed creating the ability, in the Department and in the sector, to understand and continually refine and develop the strategy long after the consultants had left the project. For the NDoT, this involved a conscious decision to use the opportunity to develop a core strategic planning capacity.

Sidebar 2:

The 1996 White Paper on National Transport Policy Vision

"Provide safe, reliable, effective, efficient, and fully integrated transport operations and infrastructure which will best meet the needs of freight and passenger customers at improving levels of service and cost, in a fashion which supports government strategies for economic and social development whilst being environmentally and economically sustainable."

Customer needs are the foundation of the Action Agenda

In the 1996 White Paper we spoke of the need for transport to be ‘outward looking, shaped by the needs of society in general, of users or customers of transport, and of the economy that transport has to support’. In our White Paper vision for transport, we have placed the needs of the customer at the heart of what we have set out to achieve.

Moving South Africa embarked from this same starting point, but as readers will note, this strategy is organised around customer segments, and not around infrastructure and the various modes as the White Paper was. The process of arriving at this Action Agenda therefore had to pay very close attention to the concept of differentiated customers with a diverse range of needs. As we have already indicated, for the NDoT, transport customers are not just the users of transport services, but also the nation itself.

The nation as a customer

Serving the "nation-as-customer" is not a straightforward challenge. The nation is the collection of all of society in all of its diversity and inequity. For any national strategy that is delivery-focused and committed to making hard choices where necessary, two sets of actions are required:

• Firstly, the goals of the ‘nation-as-customer’ need to be explicitly developed and communicated. MSA scanned government policy in general, as expressed in key documents like the RDP and GEAR, as well as looking closely at specific departmental policies, in order to determine the ‘nation-as-customer’ goals for transport. In the process, the project team at times found itself faced with national objectives that were not explicitly developed. For example, the absence of a comprehensive national tourism strategy has resulted in this Action Agenda not being able to develop a detailed strategy to support tourism objectives. Perhaps the more difficult problem faced by the MSA process was the absence of explicit government policy on the relative priority of national goals. In the context of limited resources, it is not always possible to deliver on all goals simultaneously and to the same extent. Here choices of sequence, timing and level of investment are necessary. However it is not for transport to determine such choices alone. For this reason, where we came across cases where choices are still required, we have recommended processes through which such choices should be made.
• Secondly, the transport system has impacts on the nation which are not limited to its service and cost levels. These impacts often represent hidden costs. Such costs are referred to as ‘externality costs’ because they are costs which are carried outside of the transport system (e.g. accident costs, environmental and health costs of pollution, infrastructure damage costs, etc.). Nations will generally determine what levels of externality cost they are prepared to tolerate, and how to pay both for the investments that must be made to prevent such costs arising and for the management/limitation of existing externality costs. Road safety is a good example to illustrate this issue. Government will have to make choices about how much to invest in law enforcement, how much efficiency-loss the economy should accept as a result of restrictive rules, and who should pay for the law enforcement investment and for the actual costs of collisions. Such actual costs would include, amongst others, damage to vehicles, property and infrastructure, lost production and income, and the costs in the health system resulting from death and injury caused by traffic collisions. The Action Agenda establishes a framework within which these choices should be made. It does so by starting from the principle that those who cause the externality costs should pay for them – in other words, that externality costs should be ‘internalised’ back into the transport system.

Understand customer goals

It is one thing to say in a vision statement that we will deliver against the needs of customers and users. To actually deliver against such needs means that we must have a rigorous understanding of user needs. Moving South Africa conducted in-depth primary market research and also analysed data from other sources in order to understand customer goals and segment customers into groups with similar needs. This work enabled MSA to understand how customers prioritise and rank the importance of different goals (e.g. cost, travel times, safety etc. for urban passengers and transit time/reliability, price, etc. for freight customers).

The resulting segmentation was tested with relevant experts and stakeholders. In addition, certain White Paper targets for customers were tested against the results of the MSA customer research. For example, the White Paper set a goal for commute journey time by public transport of 1 hour or less. Market research revealed that customers have goals that range from 20 to 55 minutes depending on the customer segment. This demonstrated that a one-size-fits all policy will result in customers simply making their own choices, which would lead to an ongoing exit from public transport into the private car over time.

In some cases, the MSA customer segments were also applied to existing databases such as the All Media and Products Survey (AMPS) and October Household Survey databases for urban passengers. This served to test the MSA survey-based segmentation as well as allowing us to extend the segmentation from a small sample to a national segmentation. From this MSA was then able to determine the national size of each segment.

By way of illustration, urban passengers were segmented into 6 market segments based on their use of non-motorised, public and/or private car transport modes as well as on their stated requirements. The Stranded segment (sized at 2.8 million people) walked/cycled long distances but required financial and/or physical access to public transport. Freight customers were divided into 9 segments based primarily on the type of movement (domestic short haul and trunk, SADC cross-border and international flows) and the type of product (bulk/ non-bulk).

Sidebar 3:

Customer segmentation

In this book we often talk about customer ‘segments’ or ‘segmentation’. These terms refer to a process where detailed data about the needs of customers has been gathered through primary research, and individual customers then organised into groups (segments) according to their needs. This segmentation process provides manageable categories of customers, organised according to unique sets of needs, for whom needs-based strategies can be developed. A very good example is the segmentation process for the urban passenger transport system done by the MSA team. Here all urban residents were organised into segments according to what people consider when they make choices about how to travel in urban areas, particularly the choices they make about whether or not to use public transport. This process helped MSA to understand that nearly 13% of the urban population in fact has no choice – they are too poor or too far from the network to use either public or private transport. This is the segment described as Stranded. Segmentation provides us with a detailed understanding of the needs which the strategy must aim to meet, and against which to measure the performance of the transport system. This enables us to understand how many people are dissatisfied with service, and it provides a clear basis on which to make choices about which customers should be prioritised.

The Vision for 2020

The Vision for Transport in 2020 - An Overview

By 2020, transport in South Africa will meet the needs of freight and passenger customers for accessible, affordable, safe, frequent, high quality, reliable, efficient and seamless transport operations and infrastructure. It will do so in a constantly upgrading, innovative, flexible and economically and environmentally sustainable manner. In so doing, transport will support and enable government strategies, particularly those for growth, development, redistribution, employment creation and social integration, both in South Africa and in the Southern African region.

In the context of constrained resources, this will be achieved through focusing investment behind prioritised customer groups. In the short to medium term the prioritised customers are particularly poor and very poor rural and urban passengers (the "Stranded" and "Survival" categories), selected tourist passengers (in line with the national tourism strategy) and exporters of value-added manufactured products (in line with industrial strategy). The requirements of customers with special needs, particularly those with disabilities will, over time, be met in the mainstream transport system.

To this end, three levels of action will be taken:

• Focus the scope of the transport system. This will be achieved by concentrating assets and investment to consolidate high volume routes and nodes to make up a national and various urban and rural strategic networks. The strategic networks would form the backbone of the transport system, underpinned by supporting networks.
• Deploy transport modes in the strategic and supporting networks (and their component routes) in order to capture the best economies of scale possible according to the ability of modes to meet customer needs, and
• Create an environment in which customers are empowered and transport service providers are enabled to improve efficiency, productivity and competitiveness.

Through a systematic process of unwinding the inherited legacy of the past, a new transport system will emerge. This new system will be built on a new platform as a foundation from which it will meet the needs of the majority of customers, whilst at the same time being able to innovate and meet the needs of customers with differentiated and special needs.

This solid platform will be built on a strategically integrated system of four continuously upgraded pillars. These four pillars are:

• Demanding and sophisticated customers;
• Basic and advanced input factors such as human resources, knowledge, energy sources, capital and infrastructure;
• Appropriate industry structures characterised by value-based competition and (only where necessary) regulated monopolies;
• Effective, innovative and enabling institutional and regulatory structures supported by sustainable funding arrangements.

Transport in South Africa - Today and Tomorrow

The Action Agenda is about delivery. It is, as we have already stated, about turning transport outward and focusing on the needs of the Nation and the users of transport. Unlike in the White Paper, we are here engaged with creating a framework to guide our actions not just today and over the next few years, but also in the long term. Transport systems rely on infrastructure, be it in the form of roads, railway lines, ports and airports. Such infrastructure costs billions of Rands. No nation can afford the risk of putting infrastructure in the wrong places, or putting the wrong amounts of infrastructure in places where in the future it will be faced with under- or over-utilised capacity.

The Action Agenda is important because it uses current and future national and customer goals to establish a framework to guide investment decisions by government, parastatal organisations, and the private sector. It does so in order that all of these investments collectively deliver on the Vision we have articulated for transport in the year 2020.

The strategic vision is not just about what needs to be achieved. It is also fundamentally about how transport will meet the goals of its customers and the nation. In developing the strategic framework, it was necessary to understand and take into account current realities and future trends amongst customers, within transport itself and within the broader transport environment.

Looking to the future

The Action Agenda is in part built on a foundation that takes into account a view of what the future will look like. We have been cautious not to engage in crystal-ball gazing, but rather to understand the trends in our nation and in the world which will impact on the future, particularly with regard to changes in customer needs, technology, trade patterns and transport services.

To provide the context within which this strategy is located, we briefly set out below the major trends which will influence South Africa and transport over the next twenty years.

When reading this section, it is important for the reader to bear in mind that our task is not to predict the future. Our task is to understand what is happening in the world, and to build a transport system that is connected to reality and able to respond to and anticipate change. In short, we must not only expect change - we should welcome it and shape its direction.

Global and South African Economic Trends
South Africa and the Global Economy

As a result of changes in the political context that have opened South Africa to the world, our economic reality has evolved dramatically in the last five years. For the first time in decades, South Africa has been exposed to the forces of globalisation and, as a result, has become far more linked into patterns occurring in the larger global economy. This manifests itself in nearly every aspect of the economy, from currency valuation to transport technology.

Globalisation has involved the particular phenomenon of falling tariff and non-tariff barriers to trade. These trends are especially relevant to South Africa’s transport sector. Falling barriers to trade impact not only on the volumes of trade, but also on the patterns of trade. Such changes can potentially have major impacts on national and international transport systems.

In recent years, this trend has accelerated with the formation of new multilateral trade agreements, including the World Trade Organisation, NAFTA, MERCOSUR, APEC, and now, SADC. In the last five years, South Africa signed the GATT agreement and joined the World Trade Organisation (WTO). Concurrently, trade with all regions of the world - and the SADC region in particular - has increased dramatically. This trend is expected to continue.

All of these factors, combined with domestic production conditions, have created massive changes in South Africa’s trade patterns and the nature of the goods being traded. In the last ten years, the volume of exported manufactured products has surged from 5% to 20% of exports, while gold and other primary products have fallen from 65% to 45% of exports in the same time period. These trends of continued growth in manufactured exports, and slowed growth of bulk exports, are set to continue into the future. Similarly, the rate of growth in exports will continue to outstrip the growth in imports, moving imports and exports into balance within the next ten years. All of these patterns carry substantial implications for South Africa’s transport systems. Bulk commodities require different technologies and different transport systems to non-bulk products. The balance of trade volumes can also, as will be seen in the freight strategy, have a significant impact on transport service and cost to customers.

Changes in the South African Economy

In addition to a massive reorientation of external trade patterns, the South African economy has been undergoing substantial internal changes as well. The economic policy emphasis has shifted to creating jobs through a vibrant service economy, with a strong foundation and job growth provided by manufacturing-led exports. In addition, the new economic vision for the country places high emphasis on expected growth in tourism, another transport-intensive sector.

Other, more micro-level elements of the South African economy have also begun to evolve, with substantial ramifications for transport. For instance, the new government has emphasised the expansion of economic opportunity to all citizens, beyond the privileged elite championed by the previous government. Consequently, as jobs grow and incomes rise across the board, there will be increasing demand for basic personal mobility, not just for commuting but for other activities as well. Figure 2 demonstrates the forecasted growth in incomes, which will substantially increase the demand for transport services.

Figure 2

Social Goals Driving Transport Strategy

The new government is also investing heavily in the dramatic expansion of other basic services to previously under-served communities, including water, telecommunications, health care, housing, and electricity. To the extent that these expansions put in place new infrastructure that must be physically connected by transport or make communities more sustainable, they will increase demand for transport infrastructure and services.

Transport strategy developed under apartheid set out to connect dormitory townships with urban employment nodes, leaving non-commuters largely stranded. The MSA transport strategy aims to provide all passengers with access to safe and reliable transport options, and to enable them to choose between different options, depending on their specific needs. Most significantly, the Action Agenda, in line with the vision set out in the White Paper, prioritises those segments of the population which were either marginalised or excluded altogether in the past.

With the rate of approval of new housing developments gathering momentum, transport will be needed to link commuters with their work locations, the unemployed with employment opportunities, scholars with schools, shoppers with shopping districts, traders with customers, and communities with each other. In short, the transport system must facilitate a new and higher level of social integration than before, breaking down barriers of isolation amongst communities and making possible new opportunities for all people in the country.

Finally, as incomes rise and the demographic profile of passengers change, the need for different types of transport options develops as well. While the provision of basic access to transport for the poor will remain a foundation of a new transport strategy, it must also be flexible enough to meet the needs of other passengers who require differentiated, higher value or special services from the transport system.

Transport-Specific Trends

In addition to changes in the economy at large and in the social environment, current and future trends in the global transport industry itself will have a significant impact on South Africa’s transport system. The ability to affect such trends generally falls outside of the immediate areas of influence of the South African government or operators. The major trends include:

• Liberalisation and Deregulation: especially in aviation, increasing numbers of countries are permitting open skies agreements with unrestricted entry (beyond safety regulations) with little or no protection for national flag carriers. In some cases, the liberalisation is also being applied to rail and road operators. Related to this trend, in some countries, is a reduced reliance on government operating subsidies.
• Intense Competition in Maritime Transport: as global ship lines compete and search for greater economies of scale, they are integrating with other modal partners in key countries and moving towards bigger ships that require bigger harbours and fewer ports of call. Intense competition in the industry is likely to lead to cost improvements by shipping lines and lower prices to customers.
• Globalisation of Customers and Carriers: international customers of transport are demanding high service levels, while operators are consolidating globally to meet the needs of global customers through alliances, joint ventures or outright acquisitions.
• The Rise of Information Technology: with increasingly sophisticated IT, global high-value-added manufacturers have increasingly been able to move towards just-in-time manufacturing processes, reducing inventory costs but increasing the demand for high-precision transport and logistics. Similarly, within transport, IT allows operators to offer more precise information to shippers and customers, raising service levels.
• Increasing Awareness of Safety and Environmental Consequences: developed countries, in particular, are revising their transport strategies specifically to address these externality issues. Multilateral organisations like the UN have regularly convened conferences to address the environmental issues, which eventually could result in further global treaty restrictions on emissions. Rapidly rising dependence on automobiles is the single biggest contributor to this trend, and controls and efforts to improve outcomes are in many cases raising overall transport costs to users.
• Global Manufacturing Sourcing: enabled by the advent of sophisticated IT and accompanying transport logistics, global manufacturers are increasingly sourcing their production from multiple sources around the world. This, along with the other global trends above, creates a cycle of further increased demand for high-precision, flexible, integrated transport services that deliver not only to domestic factories but to multiple foreign locations.

All of these trends, taken together with the new constitutional dispensation, the new economic strategy and goals, and the new social direction, combine to make imperative the need for a new transport strategy for South Africa.

The Legacy Transport System in South Africa

Perhaps the most compelling reason for a new transport strategy is the fact that the current transport system no longer meets many of the needs of the country or its customers. Moreover, the legacy of the apartheid era can be seen quite clearly in the transport system. In many instances, the current allocation of infrastructure and resources reflects a set of economic and social choices that have been superseded. The "facts on the ground" – the existing infrastructure, subsidies, range of services, etc. – are a direct outcome of decisions made by the apartheid government.

Transport decisions tend to be long-term in character, due to the high fixed costs involved, the spatial nature of location decisions, and the difficulty of moving property-based assets. As a result, a transport system that reflects the old strategy carries powerful momentum (to operate as it always has) into the future, even though it no longer reflects the new government’s priorities, because of the difficulty and expense involved in altering it. This legacy manifests itself in a variety of specific ways in the transport context:

• Urban Transport: the legacy urban transport system is set up primarily to carry large volumes of inexpensive labour (i.e. black commuters) long distances from distant townships to employment centres in the service of ‘separate development’.

In addition, the legacy created separate systems (with separate subsidy mechanisms) for black and white commuters, while at the same time making no attempt to regulate the key transport mode – taxis – which carries over half of all urban commuter traffic.

• Freight Transport: the legacy freight system reflects a system designed to support an import substitution economy, with pricing in certain areas designed to penalise imports. The network in itself was configured to support the "national project" of inward industrialisation and to provide cheap transport to key constituencies such as white commercial farmers.

The freight system was, however, highly successful in creating tailored systems to encourage the export of bulk commodities like coal and iron ore, in order to generate foreign exchange. The old government also used the transport parastatals, especially the railways, as a means of creating employment for the Afrikaner working class. The legacy is thus one focused not so much on transport efficiency as on the engineering of particular social goals.

• Other Areas: the transport legacy is evident in other areas, as well. Cheap roads and inexpensive cars enabled many white South Africans to bypass the need to use public transport. The long-distance road network was built to support internal travel for one small segment of the population.

In contrast, the existing road network only sporadically serves the former homelands (except to move commuters into employment areas in distant cities), and the road network in rural areas is set up to provide access for white commercial farmers, while bypassing most other rural communities. Even where there are roads, as Figure 3 indicates, commercial agricultural communities are still the ones which have the best quality roads.

Figure 3

In short, South Africa’s transport landscape is that of a network with vast scope and long distances where demand is scattered and characterised by uneven flows and dramatic peaks. For transport this means low levels of capacity utilisation. The costs of low capacity utilisation are passed onto customers in the form of high fares and tariffs, or onto government, in the form of demands for high subsidy levels. In a market where affordability is low and where government is constrained, it has also meant low levels of profitability and re-investment which have generated the negative impacts of poor safety and high externality costs.

Taken as a whole, the previous government created a transport system around national goals that were designed to accomplish employment creation for a privileged class of citizens and engineered to support a spatial dispensation of separation/dispersion with no rational long-term economic or social basis. This is the system that perpetuates itself into the post-apartheid era, and the system that the NDoT has begun to address, starting with the White Paper process.

Confronting this legacy creates an action agenda that Moving South Africa refers to as the "unwind agenda" – that is, the systematic re-creation of the system from the ground up, starting with the new national objectives. This agenda requires a process of "creative destruction": the strategy must consider how to create new institutions, new rules, and a re-alignment between new national objectives and the transport system. Also, those institutions and imperatives that do not serve the new dispensation must be reconfigured or dismantled. The "unwind" agenda is imperative – unless this step is taken, the transport system cannot build the basic platform upon which to innovate and improve. "Creative destruction" is, therefore, the first step of the process.

More Recent Trends in South African Transport and The White Paper

The White Paper process, which concluded in 1996, took the first steps towards the unwind agenda. Most importantly, it reoriented transport priorities to be consistent with the RDP and GEAR. In addition, it articulated new principles and objectives for transport – for instance, that no household should pay more than 10% of disposable income for transport. The NDoT began a dramatic reconfiguration of its own organisational structure, paring down in size from 1400 to 250 employees, and institutionally restructuring several functions into fully or partially self-funding agencies, including maritime and aviation safety, national roads, and cross-border road transport regulation.

The resulting new NDoT is focused on policy, strategy and regulation, rather than administration. Another substantial result emerging from the White Paper process is new land transport legislation, which will shortly be tabled in Parliament. This legislation will have a far-reaching impact on the institutional structure for urban transport planning, among other things creating transport authorities at local and metropolitan level with substantial jurisdiction over transport issues.

The transport sector as a whole has seen other significant developments since 1994. Several state assets have been fully or partially privatised. New developments have been considered or are in development: for example, the new port at Coega and the Maputo Development Corridor. All of these actions have contributed to moving the transport system forward and accomplishing the vision of the White Paper, but have not always occurred in the context of an integrated national transport strategy. The White Paper recognised this problem, and left room for a strategy process such as Moving South Africa to bring strategic coherence to future actions in the transport sector.

A further trend in this decade is the diminishing national financial support for transport expenditure. As claims on the fiscus to meet ambitious RDP goals have grown, the amount of national funding for transport subsidies and infrastructure construction and maintenance has dropped.

Thus, there has been increasing pressure on the transport system to do more with less funding, regardless of the strategy or the new objectives emerging from GEAR and the RDP.

Scarce Resources

The scarcity of funds for transport is one of the principal reasons for designing a national transport strategy. South Africa has limited resources, financial and otherwise, and, since 1994, has faced an increasing need to distribute those resources far more equitably than in the past, not just within transport but across the entire portfolio of national spending. In addition, time is limited, especially in the context of transport investments, which tend to be long-term and capital-intensive. And finally, there is a potentially endless scope for action: the range of possible transport projects or priorities upon which to focus is immense. For instance, should the nation invest in building new ports or in upgrading old ones? Should the nation maintain its current rail lines or invest more heavily in road infrastructure?

Given these limitations of time and resources, therefore, only a genuinely strategic national view can reconcile all of the needs and constraints, and provide decision rules for how to make the trade-offs and choices required in a world of resource scarcity.

Sidebar 4:

The need to increase capacity utilisation

Increasing the use of South Africa’s current transport assets is a vital part of the MSA Action Agenda. This means increasing the actual passenger and/or freight volumes carried on a transport service as a percentage of the total available capacity. For example, if there are 200 passenger seats available on a route per day and if 50 passengers actually use that service per day, the capacity utilisation rate on that service is 25% per day. Increasing this to 50% per day at current fares would lead to a 100% increase in revenue while these extra services would increase costs by under 50% (only running costs will increase as the fixed costs of the vehicle and labour are already paid for) leading to at least a 50% net increase in revenue.

Consolidating passenger and freight demand into high volume corridors creates the potential for drastically increasing the capacity utilisation rate. The MSA team found that Latin American and Asian bus services had capacity utilisation rates that were 4 to 8 times the current South African average. Pushing up capacity utilisation will be achieved via high volume, high speed corridors which will raise vehicle occupancy levels as well as raising vehicle speeds – thus enabling more vehicle trips. In addition, currently under-utilised vehicles will be used more, through developing differentiated services in corridors (e.g. introducing more off-peak services at lower fares, developing new routes to cater for shoppers, work seekers and car users who are willing to switch to public transport etc.).