Department of Transport
| moving south africa |
| PROJECT ORIGINS |
Department of Transport |
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Volume I: Background, Context, And Frameworks
3. Project Origins And Overview
The National Department of Transport began the Moving South Africa project in June, 1997. The project encompassed a 14 month process to take the vision developed in the 1996 White Paper and develop a twenty year strategy to realise it. This report is the final summary of that process and its outcomes, describing both the process and the recommended strategy for the South African transport sector.
In September 1996, the White Paper on National Transport Policy was approved by Cabinet and Parliament. This was the culmination of an eighteen month policy review process led by the National Department of Transport (NDOT) involving intensive consultation with stakeholders through plenary meetings, workshops, policy working groups and public comment on a Green paper. In the end, the White Paper, whilst recognising that it could not satisfy the views of every stakeholder, nonetheless represented a considerable consensus across the transport sector.
Perhaps the single most important part of the White Paper is the articulation of a vision for the transport system. This vision describes the mission of the National Department of Transport today, and forms the foundation for all of the work in Moving South Africa. This vision sets the overall objective to:
"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."
In addition to describing a vision for transport in South Africa, the White Paper set a number of strategic objectives for the system as a whole and for individual modes. Examples of these objectives include "enhance the quality of freight transport services by providing transport customers with a safe, secure, reliable, and cost-competitive system" , "establish sound intermodal co-ordinating structures", and "ensure that public transport is affordable, with commuters spending less than 10% of disposable income on transport".
In addition to the specific strategic objectives formulated for each mode, infrastructure, and road traffic and safety, the White Paper also generated ten Key Thrusts, or guidelines for any future policy and strategy formulation. The White Paper suggests two types of Key Thrusts: those that are means to achieve goals, and those that are goals themselves:
Means:
Skill & Technology Building: a key requirement of the transport industry is to build the skills and technology available to the industry
Broaden Participation in the Economy: create wider and more representative ownership of South Africa’s transport assets.
Ensure Competition: the transport strategy should build competition within the industry to ensure the highest levels of service at the lowest levels of cost.
Goals
Customer needs: the transport strategy must be based on a data-driven understanding of the needs of different customer segments, their service levels and cost requirements.
Investment objectives: national investments in infrastructure and operations should provide the required returns, be they economic returns to the country, financial returns to the investors or social returns to the people of South Africa.
Policy requirements: the transport strategy should enable the achievement of national and regional policy objectives as well as the achievement of objectives of other arms of government.
Integration: the strategy should identify where regional, modal and institutional integration can be enhanced and facilitated
Safety: the safety of people and security of goods is an essential requirement.
Environmental sustainability: the impacts of various modes and transport alternatives should be measured for their environmental impact
Low Cost for Designated Level of Service: the transport strategy must recognise that various customers have different needs and strive to meet those needs at the lowest possible cost.
Meet Basic Needs: transport has an impact on the key goals of the Reconstruction and Development Programme of meeting basic needs of the people of South Africa.
The White Paper set out the ten key thrusts because the NDOT recognised the limits of the White Paper process. Whilst, the White Paper set out a vision, strategic objectives, and policies, it did so based on a consultative process and a short- or medium-term time horizon. Because the policy review process was an effort to set the agenda and to provide a policy framework for government at all levels (in order to respond to the recent dramatic changes in the country), the White Paper process did not depend on data-driven conclusions nor look over the long-term horizon for its work (see Figure 1). As such, in the White Paper itself, the NDOT acknowledged that
"in the longer term, specific goals, strategies, and action plans to proactively lead the South African transport system into the desired vision of the future will be developed through the Department of Transport’s ‘Vision 2020’ project’
Figure 1: The Scope of the White Paper and Moving South Africa
The Moving South Africa Mandate and the Connection Between Policy and Strategy
The Vision 2020 project became ‘Moving South Africa’, which commenced in June 1997 with a mandate to
"develop a strategy to ensure that the transportation system of South Africa meets the needs of South Africa in the 21st Century and therefore contributes to the country’s growth and economic development."
By mandating Moving South Africa in this way, the NDOT charged the project with the additional responsibility for helping to break new ground in government approaches to long-term strategic issues. For this reason MSA undertook to create, and make clear, the relationship between policy and strategy. Since the White Paper had already set out the vision, MSA’s mission became to determine how – in an environment of limited resources, capacity, and time – to implement that vision in a way that is consistent with the key thrusts articulated above. For this reason it became necessary for the strategy to verify the White Paper objectives on the basis of hard data, and to reconcile or choose amongst some of the sometimes competing objectives of the White Paper.
Perhaps most importantly, the strategy was also required to create a context for action within which to achieve the White Paper objectives. In all cases, however, the Moving South Africa strategy represents an extension of the White Paper process which set the objectives and guiding principles. The strategy does this by making difficult choices, based on data, about how to meet those objectives and by considering the delivery mechanisms by which those choices are translated into reality for government , customers, and service providers.
Because the strategy covers a twenty-year time horizon, it must be sufficiently durable and sensitive to respond to changes that will inevitably occur in the transport environment and within the transport system itself. Global transport trends, population trends, economic policy shifts, national income growth, changes in manufacturing processes, or new global environmental regulations could all make some of today’s data and assumptions outdated. Although the strategy is based on 20-year forecasts, it nevertheless must set up systems and institutions that can read the environmental signals and respond to them in a coherent fashion within the context of the strategic vision. This vision, and the accompanying propagation of a set of transport strategic principles, is what ultimately creates the durable connection between strategy as it is developed and actions that are implemented. The strategy – based on a shared understanding of the data – provides a shared vision, clear choices, and consistent decision rules for all participants in the industry, including
Public and Private sectors,
National, Provincial, and Local government
Transport and other Ministries.
In recent years, several other countries have developed comprehensive national transport strategies. At the beginning of the project, Moving South Africa benchmarked three[1] of those projects to learn lessons applicable to a national transport strategy process. The countries examined were:
| Country | Strategy Title | Year Complete | Duration |
| Argentina | Plan Nacional de Transport | 1982 | 30 months |
| United States | Moving America | 1991 | 24 months |
| New Zealand | National Land Transport Strategy | 1998 | 24 months |
| vs. | |||
| South Africa | Moving South Africa | 1998 | 14 months |
The benchmark projects had varying goals, including infrastructure maintenance and expansion, supporting national economic growth, promoting environmental protection and safety, and integration of regional and national transport planning. Each of the strategies focused principally on land transport issues, covering marine and air modes only insofar as they linked intermodally with the land transport system. Moving South Africa is therefore unique in the breadth of its ambition – the mission of Moving South Africa required coverage of all major modes over a twenty year time horizon. Despite the broader scope, MSA also finished in the least time.
All but the New Zealand project used substantial macroeconomic forecasts and quantitative modeling. Neither the U.S. nor the New Zealand strategies addressed specific projects; rather, their focus was on setting the framework for decisions and devolving the responsibility for specific project-level decisions to local and regional planning bodies. In keeping with these other strategies, Moving South Africa also does not prescribe specific projects but rather focuses on creating a strategic vision and framework, as will be documented later in this report. Despite the similarities, it was clear from the benchmarking that South Africa undertook to accomplish the most ambitious, comprehensive, leading-edge work in transport strategy in many decades in any part of the world.
1MSA also examined a Dutch strategy effort, Second Structure for Transport and Traffic (1989), but did not receive sufficient information to make a full comparison
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