We cannot build our way out of congestion because traffic everywhere in the world seems to expand to fit whatever capacity is delivered, writes Mike Wills.
Cape Town - Cape Town’s traffic long ago moved from an inconvenience to a crisis.
In this week’s sweltering Monday afternoon peak I was dumb enough to drive from Bellville to Clifton and then back to Rondebosch.
This took me on a very scenic crawl through four major choke points and several minor ones.
Not being a regular habitué of the northern suburbs, I had no idea it could take 25 minutes to travel the 1.5km from Mispel Road to the N1.
Throw in a serious pile-up on the incoming motorway, half the world trying to get to the Waterfront and the other half heading to the beach, followed by a loop back into the entrails of the daily De Waal Drive eastward exodus, and I was living the nightmare of a city going nowhere slowly.
My experience gave some credence to the dubious TomTom congestion survey, which annually places Cape Town as the worst in Africa (but it doesn’t measure Lagos which, I am told, is the mother of all snarl ups) and puts us among the world’s 50 most congested cities.
Our traffic numbers are indeed truly scary.
We have a reported 150000 cars in daily peak hours with around 80percent of those vehicles containing a single occupant, an offence against the planet of which I am guilty as charged.
Between Golden Arrow and MyCiTi there are more than 1200 buses on our roads and we have around 10000 licensed minibus taxis in the region (although it often seems like 10 times that number on the N2 alone).
I couldn’t find an estimate of the number of trucks grinding around the place, but I do know that there’s always at least one of them broken down on Hospital Bend.
All together that’s obviously way too much traffic for our 9600kms of roads to cope with, and the peak creep is getting alarming - if you’re not heading out of the CBD by 3pm these days you run the risk of getting stuck.
And it’s only going to get worse. More people and vehicles are coming into the quagmire with the greater Cape Town’s population going through the 4million mark within the next five years and the airport on track to handle 10million annual passenger journeys for the first time this fiscal.
An obvious big part of the solution lies with improved public transport, but no one has much confidence Metrorail can cope with the 600 000 people it currently moves every day, let alone significantly adding to that load.
We cannot build our way out of congestion even if we could afford the many billions of rand involved because traffic everywhere in the world seems to expand to fit whatever capacity is delivered.
One of the city council’s key strategies is to fragment the peak pressures. Their 25000 employees, where possible, are being given staggered work start times and the council wants other organisations to do the same.
Makes sense to me. It’s either that or complete gridlock.