KAREN WATKINS
Europe is “leaps and bounds” ahead of Cape Town with green-energy buses, says urban mobility mayoral committee member Roberto Quintas, who recently returned from a global summit on public transport.
The City is seeking tenders for a new fleet of cleaner-energy buses, but it is a “tussle and there are a lot of moral issues”, says Mr Quintas, who returned last week from the Union Internationale des Transports Publics (International Association of Public Transport) summit, which was held in Barcelona, Spain, from Sunday June 4 to Wednesday 7.
Mr Quintas, who is also the councillor for Hout Bay and Llandudno, said a 30% import tax made it prohibitively expensive to buy an electric bus that already cost 500 000 euros (almost R10 million). Instead, the City was looking at diesel buses with low emissions and greener options in the future when electric buses might be manufactured locally.
And seeing electricity as green in South Africa was a bit of a misnomer, he added, because most of the country’s electricity came from burning coal.
Recharging electric vehicles in a country plagued by frequent nationwide power cuts was another problem.
Nevertheless, Mr Quintas said that buses powered by hydrogen-fuel cells were the future. Energy stored in compressed hydrogen tanks rather than in batteries extended the vehicles’ daily range up to 500km, he said.
Mr Quintas said the summit showed him that Cape Town stood among some of the best examples of bus rapid transport globally.
German delegates, he said, had been impressed by what Phase 1 of MyCiTi had achieved for the 2010 World Cup and what Phase 2A was expected to achieve with its dedicated bus lanes and Hanover Park Sky Circle – a traffic circle that will be more than six metres off the ground and for the exclusive use of MyCiTi buses.
Mr Quintas said his goal of having the City take over the running of Metrorail was being stalled by politicians pulling in conflicting directions.
Another aim was to link the rail, bus, MyCiTi, and even the minibus taxi services to a single ticketing system so that commuters could use one card for all public transport services, and a tender process for that was under way, he said.
Europe had no idea what it was like dealing with the problems posed by the minibus taxi industry, and the managing director of Lagos’s transport authority, Abimbola Akinajo, whom Mr Quintas said was “militant” about minibus operators in the Nigerian city, had been astounded that Cape Town spent so much effort negotiating with the taxi industry.
Mr Quintas said he had also been met with wide-eyed looks when he had described how he and his bodyguards had been caught up in a shootout during an attempted hijacking last month.
Mr Quintas said two Cape Town taxi bosses had been killed during the week he had been away. And before that, on Thursday May 4, popular taxi boss Charmaine Bailey, 53, who had been in the taxi industry for about a decade, had been gunned down after attending a Wynberg Taxi Association meeting.
