If South Africa did not spend at least five times more on upgrading the transport system nationally, the country would never achieve its target of eight percent economic growth.
This was the message from the South African Institution of Civil Engineering (SAICE), which has compiled a report on "The State of Transport" to be presented to Transport Minister Jeff Radebe.
The report calls for a fundamental re-examination of the country's entire land transport system, and for action and implementation instead of more policies, studies and plans.
At the organisation's annual meeting in Durbanville on Thursday, SAICE chairperson Jan Coetzee said this year the national budget for transport was only 1,4 percent of the country's GDP.
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"We need to spend at least five percent of GDP on transport to achieve an eigtht percent economic growth. If we don't spend on transport, it will have a serious impact on the economy," he said.
Every R1 spent on transport, added R1,27 to the GDP, and for every R1-billion spent on roads, 9 000 direct jobs were created and 15 000 indirect jobs.
He and a committee of SAICE members had compiled a study of all policy documents over the past 15 years, as well as compiling statistics on transport. They found that while good policy and legislation had been developed, little had been implemented.
It was government policy at all three levels to give public transport the highest priority, yet little had changed for the "average person in the street catching a bus or taxi" in the past 15 years.
"Have we changed anything to improve the quality of public transport? Have we made it better and safer?" Coetzee said.
The committee said there was an urgent need to shift from transport policy and planning to implementing and making the plans operational.
"It is essential we relook, fundamentally, the entire land transport system. We need to improve the basic transport service, which has not changed much. We've got all the legislation and policies. We can't only do taxi recapitalisation and say now we've improved public transport. We have to look at the whole system," Coetzee said.
The National Household Travel Survey of 2003 found that 1.3-million South Africans travelled more than an hour to reach work, he said.
The committee said it was essential to develop public transport corridors which served large numbers of people and reduced travelling time by 30%. These improvements would also lure private car users to public transport. Road congestion wasted about R2,5-million a year from people "sitting on the highways".
A major problem in South Africa was the lack of transportation engineers. There was a ratio of one engineer to 3 000 South Africans. Developed countries had one to every 150 to 450 people.
With the high staff turnover at most government authorities, the authorities simply could not deliver on transport."This high turnover has a serious impact on delivery."
SA had an high road death rate: 9 068 people had died in 1988 and 14 126 in 2005. Of these, 41 percent were pedestrians. The country's schools had no road safety in their curricula, which should immediately change, he said.
- This article was originally published on page 3 of Pretoria News on September 21, 2006
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