LETTER: Politicians must listen to professional, competent transport engineers

Transport economist Vaughan Mostert has been a long time supporter of public transport, and I agree with his general approach as expounded recently in his letter ("Civil engineers stand cynically by as public transport collapses”, June 30). However, I would like to point out that the “engineers” he refers to are not the people who set policy regarding whether more money should be ploughed into housing for the poor, or as he puts it “tarring rural roads” rather than extending major projects such as Gautrain. This is the function of government strategists and political policymakers, whose performance in transport has been particularly poor during the recent decade or more.

As a professional engineer I am one of many who pointed out many years ago that the Gautrain project, while an excellently built piece of infrastructure, has not done much to assist the public transport needs of the poor. An earlier proposal for a rail-based public transport system termed “Masstran”, proposed many decades ago by engineers in the Department of Transport, had four times the penetration of Gauteng into areas where the poorer people lived, at half the cost in real rand values. This was rejected by politicians of the previous regime for obvious reasons.

More recently, in 1996 engineers from the Department of Transport made a proposal for concessioning commuter rail services in the denser metropolitan areas. Again this was not accepted by the “rail political hierarchy”, in the same context as proposals for alternative energy sources have had a long uphill struggle. We seem to lack perceptive, sound and rational thinkers in transport matters among the political elite, as well as — with one or two exceptions I know of — in the professional staff of the current department of transport. Perhaps they are not strongly enough imbued with the ability to tell the politicians the story as it really is.

I know Dr Mostert is passionate about the need to improve an integrated public transport system that has been virtually destroyed by the “uncontrollable” taxi industry reducing bus and commuter rail transport to a shadow of what it should be. The background to this situation is complex, but could perhaps be summed up as a lack of proper management of the public transport system because of the incompetence of provincial authorities as well as an, at times, militant taxi industry.

I live in hope that the politicians will eventually listen to professionally registered competent transport engineers and common sense will prevail. Chief Justice Raymond Zondo has pointed out the path to follow.

Dr Malcolm Mitchell
Hillcrest

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