Fresh challenge for Joburg governors with commuting costs rocketing after rail fails

Key topics:Mini-bus taxis dominate as rail, bus services fail Johannesburg commuters.Commuters face high costs, violence amid taxi turf wars and poor public transit.Apartheid-era city planning hinders efforts to fix Johannesburg's transport system..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.The auditorium doors will open for BNIC#2 on 10 September 2025 in Hermanus. For more information and tickets, click here..By Zinhle Xaba.Since the collapse of Johannesburg’s passenger-rail service during the Covid-19 pandemic, Jomo Tshabalala’s monthly transport costs have surged sevenfold. The 50-year-old marketing agent now spends about 1,400 rand ($79) a month catching several private mini-bus taxis on a 26-kilometer (16-mile) daily trip to work from the majority-Black township of Soweto on Johannesburg’s southwestern outskirts to the north of the city. It’s also dangerous. In the first three months of this year, gun battles between rival taxi organizations — private entities that run routes — saw 60 drivers and commuters killed in fights over who holds monopolies on the city’s lines. “We were failed,” Tshabalala said, referring to the shutdown of the commuter-rail service in 2020 after looters vandalized most of its 580 stations and stole power lines feeding the trains, rendering about 95% of its network unusable. “It’s very expensive because I spend 30% of my salary on transport.” The Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa is slowly restoring services, and Johannesburg is making efforts to improve its public-transit offering, but it’s a far cry from what’s needed for the country’s biggest city that’s home to about 5 million people.Prasa’s annual user trips rose to 39 million nationwide in the year ending March 2024. While that’s an improvement from a nadir of 10 million in fiscal 2021, it’s a far cry from a peak of 646 million in 2009. Its disintegration has shifted more commuters than ever to mini-bus taxis, already the most common mode of transport after walking. Deregulated in 1989 and operating mainly with cash, the privately owned taxi industry — which has grown to become the backbone of South African public transit — has resisted government efforts to re-regulate it..Mini-bus taxis’ dominance of public transport is a consequence of apartheid, which confined Black South Africans to far-flung townships on the periphery of urban centers with little thought given to their mobility needs. One of the few areas open to Black entrepreneurs before 1994, the taxi industry has grown into one that’s largely unregulated and characterized by cut-throat competition..Read more:.Brave bus boss takes on the taxi Mafia, the police – and the government.Nationally, the mini-bus taxi industry makes an estimated 90 billion rand in annual revenue and has 15 million commuter trips daily in a country of about 60 million people, according to the South African National Taxi Council, known as Santaco. Prasa didn’t respond to a request for comment. .These taxis are by far the most common mode of transport in the country after walking, accounting for 26% of of all trips, while buses comprise 4.5% and trains just 0.7%, a 2022 report from the statistics agency showed. About 15% of people drive, while another 11% are passengers in private vehicles. Johannesburg has spent billions of rand on a largely stalled attempt to build out an efficient bus network with standardized fares. And its home province of Gauteng has plowed billions more into an efficient and reliable high-speed rail line — separate from the legacy Prasa network — connecting its two largest metropolitan areas with the region’s top international airport, but it’s unaffordable for many citizens.For most city residents like former Prasa user Tshabalala, little has changed. About 85% of public-transit users in Johannesburg rely on mini-bus taxis, according to Statistics South Africa. Under pressure to meet daily revenue targets, the drivers of the 14- or 15-seater buses have little regard for road rules, running red lights and often exceeding the number of passengers allowed in vehicles — primarily Toyota Quantums — that are poorly maintained. .Commuters’ daily journeys generally involve rising before dawn to find their way to a central depot in the old central business district before catching one or more onward taxis to their places of work or study across a city of endless suburbs and multiple business nodes — a legacy of apartheid spatial planning that favored sprawl over densification and rendered mass transport unprofitable. “The way that the land use was planned, or the way that the land use developed over time, makes it very hard to provide good public transport,” said Christo Venter, a professor at the department of civil engineering at the University of Pretoria.Alternatives to taxis remain limited despite the government’s efforts. Gauteng province and Johannesburg have made their own pushes, with varying degrees of success. Ahead of the country’s hosting of the soccer World Cup in 2010, the province announced plans for the 80-kilometer Gautrain high-speed railway service with feeder bus routes, while Johannesburg unveiled a blueprint for a bus rapid-transit system known as Rea Vaya, which means “we are going” in Northern Sotho. .Fifteen years later and the Gautrain, which cost 45 billion rand, hasn’t yet expanded. Rea Vaya, meanwhile, entered business rescue — a local form of bankruptcy protection — in 2023 for failing to pay its creditors, facing bus shortages and years-long delays in rolling out new routes.The Gautrain Management Agency has awaited National Treasury approval to move forward with proposed plans to enhance its services since 2021, and Chief Executive Officer Tshepo Kgobe is confident that will come this year, he said in an interview. once given the green light, the GMA can start procurement for its next phase, with hopes to begin building before President Cyril Ramaphosa’s term ends — in 2029.In May, Gautrain introduced 50% discount fares for lower-income riders..A trip from Johannesburg’s old central-business district — home to the biggest intermodal transport hub of Park Station — to the new CBD of Sandton by taxi costs 22 rand. The same journey using the Gautrain at peak hours is twice that amount at 42 rand.“The Gautrain is really serving largely a different market from the taxis and the bus services,” said Venter. “It’s not so much a mass mover like the taxis and the buses and the trains are meant to be.”.For Rea Vaya, Johannesburg built an extensive network of dedicated bus lanes and stations across large swaths of the city, with about 300 taxi operators ceding their vehicles in exchange for 12-year tenders serving the initial route linking the central urban area of Doornfontein to Soweto from 2009 through a company known as PioTrans. Mismanagement plagued the firm, leaving the operators indebted, without income and unable to bid for routes in the second phase that serve Cresta in the west through Braamfontein in the center. Johannesburg is taking a different approach for the third section — connecting the old CBD via Louis Botha Avenue in the east to the northeastern township of Alexandra and Sandton, said Kenny Kunene, head of transport in the mayor’s office.To expedite the start of the service, the city is repurposing 68 unused Gautrain buses and is advising tender winner Alexandra Bus Co. — a venture between rival taxi associations based in the township — to try to “mitigate the challenges that happened with PioTrans,” he said on the Politricking With Tshidi Madia podcast in May. In May, Johannesburg forfeited 258 million rand allocated to it by the Treasury to improve Rea Vaya because the city failed to meet the grant’s conditions. The city owns Metrobus and also works with Larimar Group’s Putco, but their services are limited and subject to violent attacks and intimidation from taxi associations including buses being burnt or shot at. That’s resulted in route suspensions and drivers avoiding transport hubs dominated by taxis.In April, Gauteng’s head of transport, Kedibone Diale-Tlabela, threatened a six-month shutdown of taxi ranks on violence-tainted routes. Santaco’s unit in the province and the Gauteng National Taxi Alliance have agreed to a “ceasefire” and to establish dispute-resolution mechanisms, according to her spokesman, Lesiba Mpya.A separate entity, the Witwatersrand Taxi Association, has asked a court to review the allocation of routes, Secretary-General Public Manzini said.Santaco has blamed the government for fomenting unrest by issuing permits to rival taxi associations on the same routes, sparking unwanted competition, said Sabata Mbobo, its Johannesburg region spokesman. .Commuters like Tshabalala have no choice but to wait and see whether peace holds.“We don’t know what’s going to happen: Taxis fight among themselves and anything can happen,” Tshabalala said. “We constantly have to check in with one another. I need to report every day to my family how my commute went, if I got to work alright — otherwise they’ll get worried.” .© 2025 Bloomberg L.P.

Fresh challenge for Joburg governors with commuting costs rocketing after rail fails

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