Will Gautrain's expansion dream put the masses on track?

The Gautrain is steaming past its critics, and the next stop is Soweto. Will the railway’s expansion dream put the masses on track — or merely blast a tunnel through taxpayers’ wallets? It will do both, and it must happen, argues Carlos Amato

Two red-headed white kids board the Gautrain at Marlboro. Ginger Boy is about nine and hyper: a Gautrain rookie. As the train pulls off, he's still standing, and lurches into the shins of the man in the seat opposite, a blipster with a complex haircut, who laughs and helps him to his feet. The kid plonks himself down next to his big sister, embarrassed.

The train flits north into Midrand. We pass a dam. Ginger Boy tells Ginger Girl, who is about 12: "Check that huge pothole!"

She says: "It's not a pothole, it's a dam."

He disagrees. "It's like a Zimbabwean pothole."

Complex Haircut interjects: "Careful. I'm from Zimbabwe."

Ginger Boy's eyes widen.

"I'm so hurt," says Complex Haircut.

Ginger Boy, mortified, stares out of the window. After a few seconds, Complex Haircut relents and laughs. The Gingers giggle.

One tiny scene from the Gautrain's daily theatre: a sweetly awkward interaction between strangers who would likely never converse beyond the train's confluence of races, classes and generations.

If you've ridden the train, you'll know that the Gautrain's people-watching pleasures defy the best efforts of its creators to eradicate all human warmth and error from its terrain.

There are more rules than it seems healthy to obey. You can't eat, drink, chew gum, shout or sell stuff. Sanctimonious PA announcements hector you about illicit travel cards. The platform benches are a triumph of vindictive design: angled to prevent sitting, in order to prevent the crime of lying down. Perhaps the only reason there is no ban on farting was the difficulty of proving guilt in a court of law.

But despite this tyrannical nonsense, and partly because of it, passengers love the Gautrain. It's safe and smart and it works.

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And soon the service could be spreading its uptight magic to all four corners of the province - linking Soweto, Lanseria, Mamelodi and Boksburg to the centres of Joburg and Pretoria, adding 200km of track to the existing 80km. If approved, the project will cost a bomb: well north of the R27-billion price for the existing routes.

But it will be worth it, in the way that exorbitant but life-saving surgery is worth it. A province-wide Gautrain would be like a triple bypass for South Africa's economic heart.

And the rewards would go beyond efficient transit. A bigger network could give a notoriously fragmented cityscape a binding communal space.

An urban train line is often called the backbone of a city transport system, but a more accurate metaphor would be the bloodstream. You can feel the complex emotional pulse of any given metropolis most clearly in its train carriages. In the random communion of travellers, seated facing each other, the urban experience crystallises in all its poetic paradoxes: gregarious loneliness, distant intimacy, nervous boredom, sad comedy.

The Gautrain as it stands is a special case, because it animates the spirit of a metropolis that doesn't yet exist. It's a wormhole to a possible future Gauteng: one in which all can commute in comfort, safety, dignity and speed.

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The railway would anchor a dense filigree of rapid bus and bicycle routes; millions would be liberated from the stress, waste and danger of our current traffic mess. We would zip around a green, densified, equitable megacity. The wounds of spatial apartheid would be healed.

If this scenario sounds improbable, well, yes - right now it is. And critics argue that the Gautrain's obsession with order has hobbled its potential to transform the city. Says Guy Trangos, a researcher at the Gauteng City-Region Observatory: "A major problem is the design of the stations and public space interfaces. There was a great opportunity for the stations to create an active and vibrant public realm, which spurs economic opportunity and grows the market for the system. The network has failed dismally in creating top-quality public spaces, with a variety of services available. Instead it has created hyper-sanitised spaces. The expansion of the network needs to consider the public function of stations much better."

Trangos says Marlboro station is the worst example. "It's an urban failure, which relates in no way to Alexandra, the neighbouring community. It could have been a public building, open to the street, but instead it's set back from the street, fenced off, with a tiny pedestrian gate that's seemingly locked most of the time."

Fair point. But bear in mind that five years ago, many South African urbanists (a largely lefty lot) sneered at the notion that the Gautrain was a progressive project in any sense. It was a R30-billion gift to the elite, they believed, one whose chief social benefit was to allow Sandton executives to squeeze in an extra hour of neoliberal job-slashing on a Friday afternoon and still catch their evening flights to Mauritius.

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The train's market has turned out to be much broader: daily users include thousands of lower-middle-class commuters who zip from Park Station, Rhodesfield, Midrand and Pretoria to workplaces down the track. Ridership has risen to 63000 every weekday last year (and more this year, due to freeway roadworks). At least 25% of those passengers don't own cars. Forty-eight new carriages are being ordered to meet peak-hour demand.

Says Geoff Bickford, a researcher at the South African Cities Network: "Minibus taxis and buses are actually quite expensive for users - and that means many people you wouldn't expect to use the train are doing so. It's cheaper than we thought, especially compared to longer taxi commutes, which require up to six trips per day."

Even if your minibus route involves one trip, the Gautrain can compete on price. A 35-day train pass for the Park Station-Sandton route comes to R26.70 per day (weekends included), as against the R24 return fare on taxis.

The catch is that in order to get the full benefit, you need to work and live near a station. This is why the planned new lines have to be built. To stop investing now would be a false economy on an epic scale.

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The Gautrain's human terminus is Jack van der Merwe, CEO of the Gautrain Management Agency. He joined the Transvaal provincial administration in 1971 and went straight to work on the massive road-building programme made possible by the '70s gold boom. He's been building transport infrastructure ever since.

When I suggest to him that many Gautengers don't appreciate the unusual reliability of his railway compared to its global equivalents, he chuckles - and recalls a Heathrow passport control officer's reaction when he told him he was visiting London to research the Underground for a railway project in South Africa. "You wot? You want to learn from the Tube?" said the officer, and laughed like a drain.

Complaining about trains is a worldwide pastime - except possibly in Geneva, whose transit system gave Van der Merwe goosebumps. "You walk out of a hotel room anywhere in Geneva, and you just walk straight in any direction. You will reach a public transport stop within 999m. By day, trains and buses leave every five minutes. By night, every 10 minutes. There's no timetable and they're not bothered if buses are empty. It's the lifeblood of a city."

When that sort of service is achieved, car travel becomes foolish - a waste of money and time. But there's a complication in South Africa: private cars are not just useful here, they are psychic liberation devices. They confer power, dignity, success - and for black citizens, triumph over racial oppression. Public transport has traditionally been a humiliating penalty for black poverty and for many it remains that. When you're squashed into the back of an unsafe taxi at 5am every day, your own car is a consuming dream.

"Public transport in South Africa is a mode of force," says Van der Merwe. "We need to make it a mode of choice."

Inducing that shift will be hard. "It's difficult now for the public to see it all happening, because the various projects are working in silos, but when the Metrorail upgrades and the three BRT [bus rapid transit] networks all become fully operational, the whole integrated system will click together," says Van der Merwe.

It's all sketched out in the Integrated Transport Master Plan, a policy document commissioned by Gauteng transport MEC Ismail Vadi in 2014 to re-engineer the province to cope with projected population growth in the next 25 years.

"About 530 people migrate to Gauteng every day," says Van der Merwe. "In 23 years, Gauteng will have a population of 18.6million ... and 25 million passenger trips a day. That's equivalent to greater London and greater Paris. So we have to emulate their systems."

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Moving that many people around will be impossible if the city expands outward. And if the current land use plans are not boosted, then a new housing backlog of 1.5 million people will open up by 2040. "So we have to start densifying and in-filling. We have to build three-storey walkups, and we have to plan the developments in open spaces - so we will fill in the triangle between Joburg, Pretoria and Ekurhuleni."

A planned Gautrain line from Mamelodi to Soweto would be the game-changer: it would serve the envisioned high-density suburbs around Midrand and Tembisa, plus the populous west of Joburg, stopping at Cosmo City, Honeydew, Ruimsig, Roodepoort and Soweto.

The second new line would link Lanseria, Cosmo and Randburg to Sandton, and then extend southward from OR Tambo to Boksburg.

A feasibility report on the expansion plan will be ready in six weeks, says Van der Merwe.

The state has competing priorities: power, education, health, water infrastructure. But the Gautrain has a forceful case that it more than pays for itself: sparking job creation, property investment, road safety, productivity gains.

A new KPMG study values the service's impact on the provincial economy at R46-billion - nearly double the taxpayer's investment. The monthly subsidy from the province is dropping steadily as ridership swells.

But the unanswerable argument is that if the Gautrain doesn't expand, Gauteng will soon become unliveable. This infuriating, addictive megacity will exist for centuries yet, weather permitting. It will keep growing, under bad governments as well as good. And our descendants will curse us if we decide it's not worth fixing.

sub_head_start The stats that argue for the Gautrain's expansion sub_head_end

R47-billion - Estimated total value added to the Gauteng economy by the train

18.6million - Projected population of Gauteng in 2040. It is 13.2million today

24 200 fewer car journeys a day due to the Gautrain in 2014 (and even fewer now) - which implies at least 14 lives saved every year because there are fewer accidents on the highway between Johannesburg and Pretoria

12 - The number of working days saved a year by the typical Gautrain commuter: the train is eight times faster than road travel in peak traffic

34 800 jobs directly created during construction

87 000 jobs indirectly created during construction

245 000 jobs created by property developments induced by the Gautrain

52% reduction in the carbon footprint of Gautrain users who used to commute by car

Source:'Gautrain: Our Journey to a Better Gauteng' - KPMG report, November 2014