Reducing Our Carbon Emissions - The Role of an Integrated Approach to Access, Mobility and Space in South Africa
Friday, 05 November 2010 |  Jeremy Cronin  |  3 comments

Image by Geof Wilson

Jeremy Cronin, Deputy Minister Department of Transport
WWF Roundtable, “Getting there: The future of transport in a low-carbon economy”
(Johannesburg, 26 October 2010)



South Africa is one of the worst per capita carbon emitters in the world. Quite correctly this dismal fact is most often associated with the high levels of energy intensity built into our present economic growth path, notably our historic addiction to “cheap” energy derived primarily from coal-fired power stations. Less often noted is the contribution of the transport sector to our high levels of carbon emission and particularly to the connection between this and the socio-economic geography of our country. After the energy sector, transport is, in fact, the second most significant contributor to our carbon emissions.

To understand the challenges we have in reducing carbon emissions in the transport sector, it is necessary to understand South Africa’s geography – not so much as a geo-physical fate that we simply have to accept, but rather more as an historical, political, social and economic construct that, therefore, can (and must) be transformed, however difficult that might prove to be.

There are several dimensions to South Africa’s problematic socio-economic geography:

• First, there is our historic insertion into the global economy as a semi-peripheral economy characterized by an excessive dependence on primary commodity exports and capital goods imports.  It is often said, that “SA is distant from its markets”. A significant amount of what we produce and what we consume travels over long (energy-burning) distances – to and from a domestic industrial heartland in the deep hinterland through the former colonial sea-ports that connect us to our major trading partners in faraway Europe, North America and now, increasingly, in Asia.
• But, secondly, to say “we are distant from our markets” is really just another way of saying that our own regional and domestic economies are seriously distorted and under-developed;
• Thirdly, the distortions and under-development of our domestic economy cut across several spatial challenges – including the former white commercial farming/former Bantustan duality that persists in our countryside; the urban/rural duality in general; and our perverse urban geography.

All of these factors pose major challenges for the transport sector, and our major transport problems, including an excessive carbon footprint are often symptomatic expressions of our spatial challenges. Transport, however, can also be a catalyst for changing space and reducing carbon emissions.

In addressing these challenges, I will focus largely on one dimension – namely, our problematic urban geography.

Urban form in SA

South Africa has an exceptionally dispersed urban form in comparison to almost all developed and developing countries. Alain Bertaud, a social geographer, recently presented a paper that compared population densities in built-up areas in 51 metropolitan areas around the world.[1] Gauteng had 23 people per hectare and Cape Town had 32 people per hectare. These South Africa metropolitan densities were low compared to London (62), Paris (88), Rio de Janeiro (101), Seoul (322) and, at the far extreme, Mumbai (389). In the low density stakes, Gauteng and Cape Town were only exceeded by 8 US cities (among them Atlanta, Houston, San Francisco and Los Angeles).

Philip van Ryneveld[2] identifies three key factors that have driven this dispersed urban form in SA:

• SA is relatively sparsely populated and key urban areas, particularly in the interior, did not generally develop in land use contexts that were liable to constrain urban growth;
• Secondly, from the 1960s through the period of intensified apartheid, high levels of car ownership developed amongst the white population. This was the only segment that wielded significant political power and increasing car ownership levels were associated with major highway construction programmes that facilitated the growth of extensive low density suburbs; and
• Thirdly, and most often noted, four decades of apartheid saw the preservation and intensification of earlier racial segregation patterns, and the extensive development of marginalized dormitory townships on the outskirts of most towns and cities.

While there have been attempts since1994 to promote more integrated land use development, generally low-density urban sprawl has continued and in some respects significantly expanded. There are several factors involved:

• The liberalization of commercial farming in SA (with a resultant displacement of some 1-million farm-dwellers) and the continued collapse of subsistence rural economies in the former Bantustans and, indeed, throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa, have resulted in in-migration and the mushrooming of informal settlements on the outskirts of many metropolitan areas;
• The well-intentioned low-cost, RDP subsidized housing programmes have tended to be narrowly focused on “delivering” some three million individual housing units with insufficient attention to more comprehensive and sustainable mixed-income and mixed-use human settlement land use. To maximize the number of units built within budget, the location of these RDP housing projects has also tended to be on the distant margins of towns and cities – where the land is cheaper. These factors have meant that, ironically, we have continued to reproduce the dormitory township settlement pattern for workers and the poor – a pattern that was typical of the apartheid era.
• A lack of effective and coordinated long-range, built-environment planning – the consequence of many factors, including public institutional tangles (bureaucratic silos, turf battles, confusing constitutional mandates, etc.) and public administrative weaknesses. These weaknesses have resulted in built-environment  “development” often being driven by property speculation and political short-termism (sometimes characterized by one-off vanity projects). These factors, in turn, have meant that major infrastructure spending has often defaulted to those with most market-power, hence imbalances in transport infrastructure spending, which has often been biased against public transport and in favour of private car usage on freeways linked to new shopping malls and peripheral office block developments.

The impact of our urban spatial geography on public transport

The impact of our sprawling, low density urban geography has particularly severe consequences for the viability of public transport.

In particular, significant pressures are placed on our transport systems by the continued spatial marginalization of a majority of working class and poor citizens. Large volumes of people commute over considerable distance on a daily basis to work and educational and other amenities. For instance, the average trip length of public transport commuters in Tshwane is 25,4kms – this compares with the average public transport trip in London (8,6kms) or Moscow (7,7kms)[3]

The dormitory township at long distance from work and key amenities imposes two further challenges on public transport –

• Commuting in South African cities is characterised by very high peak to base demand ratios. The bus, minibus and rail system capacity needs to be determined by the peak demand, but much of this capacity is idle during the day. Running the fleet off-peak is expensive and unprofitable, but leaving it idle is inefficient and drives up costs. Furthermore, because of the long distances many vehicles are only able to run a single trip in the morning and another in the evening.  

• A related challenge is the ‘tidal flow’ demand pattern – when public transport vehicles are able to make more than one trip in each peak period, they tend to travel full in one direction, but empty on the return trip. This is another inefficiency and cost-driver.[4]

These challenges mean that typically there are patchy (or non-existent) off-peak and weekend public transport services to townships. These patchy services then become part of a vicious circle, with the effect, in turn, becoming a cause of the further physical and social marginalisation of dormitory township communities from the town of which they are notionally a part.

In the light of the economic sustainability challenges in much of our public transport systems, government has for many years subsidized commuter rail and many bus services. In the current 2010/11 financial year, for instance, the operational subsidy to PRASA is R3,2bn, while bus operational subsidies through the Public Transport Operational Grant are R3,9bn. Notwithstanding these subsidies public transport is often extremely costly for low-income earners. The Department of Transport’s 2003 National Household Travel Survey found commuters from households with a monthly income of less than R500 per month (in 2001 prices) were spending an average 35% of their income on transport; those with a monthly income of between R501 and R1000 were spending 23%, and those between R1001 and R2000 were spending 14% on average. Among the category of discouraged unemployed persons (i.e. those who fall into the broader definition of the unemployed), a majority cited transport costs as the key reason for giving up on looking for work.   

So what can TRANSPORT do about this?

The argument so far has been that in many respects public transport and those dependent upon it are the victims of an extremely inequitable and inefficient urban (but not just urban) geography.

But is there anything that TRANSPORT can do to act as a catalyst for changing our inequitable spatial realities?

Since at least 1996 and government’s White Paper on National Transport Policy we have grappled with this challenge. The White Paper set two important (but still not attained) targets – promoting public transport over private car use, with a target of an 80:20 public transport to car-use ratio. It also set an objective of affordability with a target of commuters spending less than 10% of income on transport. The White Paper saw the means for achieving these objectives to be through more effective integration of public transport services, particularly by way of increased intermodal alignment. Interestingly, the White Paper also linked this to the principle of subsidiarity – i.e. the ideal of devolving responsibilities as much as possible to the appropriate sphere of government. It is a theme to which we have returned more strongly in the last few years.

Moving South Africa (1999) developed these perspectives further and, in particular, it identified poor spatial planning as the biggest impediment to effective public transport services. Amongst other things, it called for dedicated road infrastructure for public transport without which, it noted, corridor densification would be impossible. Again, this is an approach to which we have increasingly turned in recent years.

The National Land Transport Transition Act (2000) attempted to give legal force to these policy perspectives, and, in particular legislated for Transport Authorities which were to become the key transport planning and coordinating entities. In practice, only one TA was ever established and effective implementation of more planned and coordinated public transport never really got off the ground. There were many reasons for this. In retrospect, the new local government dispensation that came into effect in the same year (2000), establishing single-tier metropolitan authorities encompassing the whole metropolitan area, removed much of the original rationale for TAs.

Indeed, with the National Land Transport Act (2009), and with the existence now of Metro Council structures in our major cities, it has become possible to move much more effectively to begin to devolve and assign transport planning, transport infrastructure implementation, public transport regulation (including operational licensing) and control over public transport operational funding to metros and major cities. This will, of course, be an incremental process, based on readiness and capacity. The institutional and locational scattering of these various functions has been a key factor undermining our capacity to effectively plan, implement and coordinate public transport systems.

An important and relatively new policy instrument informing the NLTA is the department’s Public Transport Strategy and Action Plan (2007) which calls for a shift in public transport services away from operator-controlled, commuter-based, uni-modal routes to user-oriented, publicly-controlled, fully integrated, mass rapid public transport network operations. The policy also envisages the incorporation of existing bus and minibus operators within the new integrated rapid public transport networks (IRPTNs).

The key financial instrument for realizing these strategic objectives is the Public Transport Infrastructure and Systems Grant which is an allocation from national government to municipalities for the establishment of integrated public transport networks. The PTIS grant was first introduced in 2006/7 and in the current financial year a total of R3689,5 million has been allocated to 12 municipalities.

This move towards integrated city-level devolution has been further spurred on by the pressures of hosting the FIFA World Cup finals in nine separate host cities. We are obviously encouraged by the transport achievements notched up during the World Cup – including winning over (at least temporarily) a middle class public transport ridership and knitting together previously segregated spaces. There are positive policy and institutional lessons that we have derived from the World Cup experience. It now becomes very important that we sustain the positive momentum and image of public transport gained from this experience.

In the DoT we are using both this momentum and the leverage of policy and funding to achieve not just more affordable, accessible and reliable public transport, but also as a catalyst for transforming land use. For instance, in the DoT we engage our colleagues in city administrations quite robustly to ensure that the PTIS grant is not used to simply replicate and modernize a township-freeway-CBD commuting pattern. Freeways tend to create sterile and unfriendly pedestrian spaces along their corridors. We use the leverage of policy and the allocation of PTIS grants to encourage BRT routes, for instance, that are actually or potentially viable for densification and which knit together communities and which also offer better possibilities for off-peak, bi-directional use and networking.

Notwithstanding this national engagement, we fully appreciate the importance of the devolution of key public transport functions to municipalities. For this reason we are also in the process of moving the Metrorail operational subsidy to the relevant cities with Metrorail operations. This may only be possible by the time of the 2012/13 budget, but we are wanting to ensure that there is a performance reporting mechanism to the metros from Metrorail even before the 2012/13 budget.

Travel demand measures – if we are to achieve the desired 80/20 modal split between public and private transport, then we need also to put an increasing squeeze on private car use – something that is widely practiced in many other parts of the world. Measures include road tolling, reassessing urban parking fees and the restriction on parking-lots and Parkades, taking space away from private cars through dedicated PT lanes, BRT systems, and increased pedestrian, bike and non-motorised transport infrastructures, etc.

Of course, these travel demand measures can only really work if they are introduced in complementary ways with vastly improving public transport. The lack of the latter has meant that our well-intentioned October month “Car Free Days” are largely symbolic of intent rather than actually car free. However, if there is better public transport, putting the squeeze on private car use will also help to create a broader market for public transport.  

In all of these endeavours, devolution of transport functions is critical. This should allow for more integrated planning and implementation. It also allows, in principle, for key trade-offs to become more transparent, both to local governments and to local communities. For instance, as already noted, locating mass low-cost housing on a distant periphery of a town might mean that more housing units can be built within budget because of lower land prices. However, the impact of this choice in terms of transport costs, lower productivity of workers due to exhausting commutes and increased carbon emissions, amongst other things, is unlikely to register if various functions are scattered across different spheres of government and different national and provincial departments.

And this brings us to the second leg of challenges that we confront. Well planned, integrated public transport networks can be important instruments for propelling spatial transformation – but transport can’t drive spatial transformation on its own.


So what can EVERYONE else do about it?

In the DoT we would like to claim some credit for what I believe is starting to be a more generalized paradigm shift within national government. It is a paradigm shift that is beginning to better appreciate the embedded structural perversities of our current social geography, and to appreciate that this is not just an apartheid legacy that will gradually evaporate on its own. Spatial transformation requires clear evidence-based policy, and effective and coordinated land use planning and management.

This paradigm shift is still work-in-progress, but I would like to flag a number of indicators and opportunities:

Planning Commission – the recent establishment of a national Planning Commission in the Presidency is a potential step towards consolidating a new paradigm on spatial transformation. Especially pleasing is the fact that the first substantial topic the Commission has focused upon is, precisely, spatial planning. Opening the Commission’s Spatial Planning Seminar earlier this month, the Minister in the Presidency for the Planning Commission, Trevor Manuel said:

“We have a spatial distribution that is better suited for middle income families who have private vehicles, yet we have a large number of people who depend on public transport. This imposes a heavy burden on the poor as well as on the government, while the long commuting hours impact on individual productivity.”

From the side of the DoT we look forward to learning from and engaging actively with the ongoing work of the Commission.

Draft Land Use Management Bill

In June this year the Constitutional Court declared invalid parts of the Development Facilitation Act. The Court gave government 24 months to remedy the legislative defects. One of the problems has been that the Development Facilitation Act of 1995 was intended as an interim measure to deal with a legacy of disjointed and discriminatory spatial planning and land use management systems. The Act of 1995 did not, however, repeal previously existing land use management legislation, hence many legal tangles.

The Constitutional Court ruling has now helpfully prompted an effort on the side of government to produce fresh legislation. Already a preliminary draft Land Use Management Bill has been tabled and supported in principle in the Economic Cabinet Committee. While this is not yet a public document, it is very heartening to note that it seeks to establish “directive principles” that will guide all spheres of government in regard to spatial planning, land use management and regulation. These directive principles are likely to include, critically, the promotion of compact, sustainable human settlements; the discouraging of urban sprawl; and the promotion of close proximity between residence and workplaces.

This work is being driven by the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform, in close collaboration with the Planning Commission in the Presidency.  As the Department of Transport we will be engaging with the development of this legislation, a process that must be completed over the next year-and-a-half.

From “Housing” to “Human Settlements”

One of the changes brought about by the new administration after the 2009 elections was a change in name of the former Housing Department. It is now the Human Settlements Department. A name change does not guarantee a substantive change, of course, but here again it is encouraging to note important paradigm shifts. In its key outcomes commitments the department is now shifting from what has tended to be a rather singular focus on constructing rows of single unit subsidized houses (coupled with a well-intentioned but problematic promise to demolish all informal settlements by 2014). Among the key strategic commitments of the new department is to have a multi-pronged focus on settlements – while continuing with its low-cost subsidized housing projects; it is also now focusing on upgrading informal settlements when these are “well located”; as well as addressing the major gap in the housing market – the large number of formal sector workers and others who cannot obtain housing bonds from the banks, but who also do not qualify for a subsidized house. This last-mentioned social category holds out important possibilities for mixed-income, mixed-use and medium-density developments with positive spin-offs for public transport ridership.

Department of Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs

In the new language of performance monitoring and evaluation, the COGTA department has an Outcome 9 which envisages “a responsive, accountable, effective and efficient local government system”. Output 1 under Outcome 9 is to “implement a differentiated approach to municipal financing, planning and support”. And Sub-Output 1.2 is “increased autonomy in respect of infrastructure and housing delivery.” In particular, COGTA is looking to provide accreditation to 6 metros and 21 municipalities to build houses. There is an obvious convergence between COGTA’s commitments here and the DoT’s devolution of key public transport responsibilities to the municipal sphere when and where there is capacity.

A municipal business tax for infrastructure development?

The former Regional Services Levy was an important instrument for raising local funding for infrastructure development. In principle, a localized tax, ring-fenced for infrastructure development can encourage greater transparency and responsibility on the part of local authorities. Over-reach with your taxation and businesses will re-locate. Fail to consult on, or fail to implement your infrastructure projects, and local businesses will be more inclined to demand answers. On the other hand, as the reported soaring of property prices around Gautrain (and, to some extent, Rea Vaya) stations indicates, there is also the other side to the story. Government has committed R25,5-billion of public money to the Gautrain project and this public money has contributed to some property developers and owners scoring very handsomely. Is it unreasonable to tax these beneficiaries in order, for instance, to put down further public transport infrastructure that improves the inter-connectivity between Gautrain and, say, the Rea Vaya BRT? I stress that the proposal around a localized business tax ring-fenced for infrastructure development remains a debated proposal within government. There is support for the idea but also strong disagreement. It is surely worth further investigation and discussion, and I hope that those of you outside of government will also contribute to this discussion.