In August Gauteng’s portfolio committee on roads & transport put the Gautrain Management Agency’s feet to the fire. The topic was the proposed phase one extension of the Gautrain running east-west from Little Falls, passing through Randburg and Sandton and terminating in Marlboro. They were right to do so.
There is a lot to criticise about the Gautrain. It carries too few people. It is too expensive. Its stations are too difficult to access by foot, and sterile and hostile once you are in them. It is insufficiently integrated with other modes of public transport and too oriented towards drivers. The buses are outright lousy. I have elsewhere called Gautrain a highway on rails — not a good thing for public transport.
Yet what Gauteng needs is more Gautrain, not less — and certainly not the amount it has, which is the worst of both worlds. This is for three reasons.
The first is that there is no acceptable future for Gauteng that is not built on dramatically expanded public transport, serving poor and rich alike. South Africans love their cars, but they also do not have a choice: getting to work or school or the shops without one is slow, expensive and uncomfortable, and is therefore done mostly by those who have no choice.
The 1998 transport white paper was correct to conclude there is no quantity of roads to be built in Gauteng that would prevent gridlock in the coming decades. More roads mean more sprawl, which means more car dependence, which demands more roads. The Gautrain is needed to help break the cycle.
Is it enough? No. Money and energy also need to be put into improving and extending the entire public transport and pedestrian system. But it will not be possible to convince people en masse to get out of their cars and into fast, comfortable, high-quality public transport without a robust Gautrain network.
Which is the second reason Gautrain cannot stop where it is: it must be a network. Public transport only works as a tightly integrated network — ideally a grid — where transfers are easy and quick, and travellers are not stuck on a single route. Each route represents a new set of origins and destinations and contributes ridership to every other route on the system.
Of course, Gautrain is underperforming: it is only useful to get between a narrow set of destinations, and if you do not both live and work on the network you are out of luck. The Gautrain buses are largely a failure, partly because they are subject to the dysfunction of our roads. Gautrain needs to be able to serve a large swathe of Gauteng’s population and its destinations, integrated with other modes and pedestrian infrastructure. It is the only way people will consider leaving their cars and taking the train.
The third reason is that the first phase is always the hardest. A colleague of mine at the National Treasury used to talk about “school fees”: what you pay early in a project not because it produces results but because you are learning what to do and — crucially — what not to do. With major transport projects the first routes always underperform, and everyone has to learn by doing.
The point of the first routes is to bootstrap the capacity and knowledge to be able to build the network out for decades to come. The most efficient transport systems rely on enormous internal government capacity — hundreds of engineers, transport planners, architects, and project managers — even if they contract out the construction and operation. That capacity is needed to design the system, manage contractors and monitor performance.
Gautrain has been paying its school fees. The Gautrain Management Agency now houses engineers, economists, transport and town planners, and a broad swathe of other expertise. We need to turn that capacity to building and running the next routes better, using what it has learnt. State capacity is the scarcest resource in SA: it is key to making good decisions and executing them well. The smart thing to do, having built that precious capacity, is to squeeze the most use out of it. The unwise thing is to call it quits.
I am a critic of Gautrain — I have a long list of improvements and global best practices ready for when they make me CEO. But I am a loyal opponent: I criticise it because it is too important not to do right, and certainly too important not to do at all. I ask the legislators considering Gautrain: join me in loyal opposition. Criticise it even harder. Demand improvements, and force it to do better when it builds the next route, and many routes after that.
This opinion piece was written for Business Live by Jesse Harber a political economist focusing on urban and transport governance. 
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