While taxi industry has genuine issues, violence no answer

The Times Editorial: The battle between the local authorities in Johannesburg and the taxi industry over the introduction of new bus routes is threatening to get ugly.

Some have broken the law by committing acts of violence against the BRT buses, their drivers and their passengers.

The state must act to stop this by arresting and prosecuting the perpetrators with some urgency.

It is not acceptable for anyone in an open, democratic society to attempt to impose their will using violence.

But this does not mean that there are not genuine issues driving the protest by taxi drivers.

Whatever the authorities might say, the introduction of the buses must ipso facto reduce the number of people taking taxis.

This, in turn, must take food off the tables of those who will be out of work.

The authorities say that taxi drivers will find a place in the BRT system. But the number of new bus-driving positions will be less than the number of lost taxi driving positions.

There are suggestions being made that the taxi operators are balking at being drawn into the tax net. If this is the case, we must ask ourselves why the government has not used its tax enforcement regime to make them comply.

To raise this fact as innuendo is simply not good enough.

The underlying question remains whether or not the substitution of black-owned privately owned and managed taxis with a taxpayer funded state-run bus service has been properly thought through.

Is it automatically the proper solution to South Africa's transport problem because "that's how they do it in Europe"?

Perhaps there is still a larger role for a properly regulated taxi industry, which puts food on the table in countless households.