Astrid Wood - How Cities Learn

I am lucky to have an encouraging husband whose love is my firmest support, children who brighten even the cloudiest of days, and a family that keeps me grounded throughout the many travels we take as academics and individuals.

This book captures and shares the story of BRT in South Africa, and provides a vital record of post-apartheid transformation. Many of the key figures named in this book have since left government, retired or otherwise moved on to new positions, taking their institutional memory with them. They risked their careers and their lives for a more equitable South Africa. Thank you for your bravery, dedication and candor.

I dedicate this work to my late father whose pursuit of social justice imbued me with a similar sense. His anti-apartheid activism, along with so many others, helped make the country of my birth a better place.

This book is for all those who believe.

From Curitiba and Bogotá to Ahmedabad and Beijing, bus rapid transit (BRT) has promised to be a quick, cost-effective and efficient method of urban transportation that combines the speed and quality of rail transportation with the flexibility of a bus system. BRT is a rubber-tired mode of urban public transportation that combines buses, busways and stations with intelligent transportation systems, operational and financial plans, integrated ticketing, and a branded identity. It has been a dominant feature of urban planning for decades in cities as diverse as Bogotá, Curitiba, Guangzhou, Lima, Los Angeles, Mumbai, and New York, among others. Whereas previous studies have considered the characteristics of BRT (Deng and Nelson 2011; Jarzab et al. 2002; Levinson et al. 2003) or its impact on transportation planning (Ferbrache 2019; Paget-Seekins and Munoz 2016), this book is the first attempt to understand the global proliferation of BRT.

Much of its current popularity is due to the vehement promotion undertaken by Enrique Penalosa, Bogotá’s Mayor from 1998 to 2001 and again from 2016 to 2019, and his ties with the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP) (Wood 2014b, 2019b). More than two decades since Bogotá’s Transmilenio opened to global acclaim, BRT has become one of the most prominent policy solutions of the 21 stcentury. Around the world, Transmilenio-style systems are commended by BRT advocates for improving mobility, by reducing travel time and improving comfort and reliability; and its transformation into best practice is often attributed to its affordability, brief implementation phase and generous political payoffs. It is presented as a best practice appropriate within a variety of geographical and socio-political settings, and able to tackle problems related to economic exclusion and inequality, urban sprawl and sustainability, and transportation inaccessibility.

The Bogotá model of BRT first arrived in South Africa in July 2006 at a special session of the Southern African Transport Conference (SATC), the largest transportation convention in the region and a critical platform for dialogue on issues ranging from finance to public transportation. Lloyd Wright, a global expert on BRT, was invited by the National Department of Transport to host a day-long workshop on the principles, attributes and engineering specifications of BRT. This learning was reinforced in August 2006 when Lloyd Wright visited politicians and transportation planners in Cape Town, eThekwini, Johannesburg and Tshwane to present the attributes of BRT. Interested cities then took a select group of politicians, planners, operators and consultants to Bogotá to see how BRT operates and meet with transportation operators. Policymakers returned from these study tours eager to introduce BRT locally.

Since 2006, BRT has been adopted in six South African cities to improve transportation services, especially for the urban poor. Cape Town, eThekwini, Johannesburg, Nelson Mandela Bay, Rustenburg, and Tshwane are currently in various stages of planning and implementation: in August 2009, just three years after learning of the Bogotá model of BRT, Rea Vaya Phase 1A opened in Johannesburg as the first full-feature BRT system in an African context; in May 2011, Cape Town’s MyCiTi Phase 1A became operational; in May 2012, eThekwini Council approved plans to proceed with the first three lines of Go Durban!; and in July 2012, the cascade continued with Rustenburg and Tshwane beginning construction on Yarona and A Re Yeng. Not all cities have had a simple, straightforward experience, however: since 2008, Nelson Mandela Bay’s attempt to introduce BRT has been stalled by municipal politics and poor planning, and in spite of considerable efforts, the project remains in a state of postponement.

While the South African systems are unmistakably modeled after the achievements of those in Bogotá, the process through which South African officials learned of, and implemented BRT, remains unexplored. In mapping the learning process, this book considers how and why city leaders adopt circulated best practice.

The adoption of BRT in South Africa reflects the historical spatial planning of apartheid (Christopher 1995; Parnell 1997; Parnell and Mabin 1995; Robinson 1996, 1997) and the challenges facing post-apartheid policies to remedy these dysfunctional schemes (Haferburg and Huchzermeyer 2014; Harrison et al. 2008, 2014; Parnell and Pieterse 2014). South African cities were shaped primarily by policies of strict racial segregation but also rigorous separation of economic and residential zones, which denied Black residents full access to the city and its economic base (Davies 1981; Home 1990; Lemon 1991; Western 1985); and had the secondary objective of increasing travel times considerably for non-White residents (Pirie 2013, 2014). Apartheid settlement strategies located townships on the periphery of cities and heavily subsidized public transportation to enable workers to travel long distances at low fares (Beall et al. 2002; Turok and Watson 2001). Under the old regime, only those with passes were permitted to travel between the townships and the city, and thus movement was generally only permitted on weekdays between home and work. Because of the inheritance of these restrictions, to this day there is effectively no pattern of non-work travel between the suburban areas and the city center. The introduction of BRT is an attempt to unsettle these socio-spatial settlement patterns.

Today, South African cities are characterized by contrasts and dualisms: high-rise residential towers turned slums; Victorian houses surrounded by privatized greenery; endless stretches of banal suburban development punctured by low-cost government-sponsored housing; European cafés and upmarket shops with hawkers selling homemade wares and promising to guard the luxury cars. The one commonality across the fragmented post-apartheid landscape is the proliferation of the automobile – its presence dominates the physical landscape of the city as well as the cultural milieu. Obviously, the South African city is not unique in this feature, but the degree to which apartheid’s forced segregation stretched the city amplifies this condition. Although this understanding of the spatial character of the South African city as uneven is generally applied ubiquitously, there are profound differences across South African cities reflecting their distinctive topography and resulting settlement patterns, as well as their sociocultural composition, economic vitality and historic planning and contemporary governance. My assessment of the spatial form and associated mobility dynamics sheds light on the complex and challenging advancement of inclusive South African cities.

South African history is riddled with transportation experiments: horse-drawn streetcars were introduced in the 1890s, electric trams operated until the Second World War and trolleybuses ran in the high-apartheid period until Johannesburg, the last city to do so, terminated services in 1986. There are a number of detailed empirical accounts of the trams and trolleybus systems in Cape Town (Gill 1961; Joyce 1981), eThekwini (Jackson 2003), Johannesburg (Sey 2012; Spit and Patton 1976) and Nelson Mandela Bay (Shields 1979), as well as analyses of the development of the road system (e.g. Rosen 1962 in Johannesburg) and the emergence of the minibus taxi industry (Khosa 1991, 1995; McCaul 1990). Because South African city form and function makes it difficult to support a sunken subway – Johannesburg is built atop a maze of underground gold mining shafts and Cape Town rests largely on marsh and infill – transportation officials and engineers have struggled to modernize the commuter rail and municipal bus services. The commuter rail network is poorly maintained and its fixed lines prove inadequate in the expanding metropolises. Bus systems are similarly struggling to service the low-density urban form. The modernist aspiration of car ownership and its associations with independence and wealth is reinforced in practical terms through the dispersed city form, which separates people from economic and social opportunities.