EDITORIAL COMMENT: Efficient urban commuter system critical

kombisBy default, privately-owned minibuses usually rented out to their drivers cope with Zimbabwe’s public transport needs, moving an estimated million people a day to and from work and school.

The system works in the sense that people do get to work and get back home, but is far from ideal for both passengers and other road users.

The kombis replaced a system built up over decades using large conventional buses, the fleet in the end largely consisting of 76-seaters, with another 23 allowed to stand in urban commuter trips and all built in Zimbabwe.

This system fell to pieces largely by an insistence on setting fares at levels too low to maintain and replace buses. Poor management may have been a contributing factor, but over-low fares were the prime cause.

Pressure from commuters on fares eventually led to the destruction of the service most now desperately desire to be restored. Moves are in place to do just this and hopefully do it properly.

The World Bank has helped finance proper bus-based public transport systems in several major African cities and now Zimbabwe is starting the necessary studies to see if it can join the group. It is obviously not going to be an instant process.

A lot of expert skill has to be applied to some data that needs to be far more accurate than the present estimates.

If the service is going to work it has to be both affordable and viable. Wishful thinking and bad management cannot be part of the studies or their eventual implementation. Potential users will need to be consulted fully on what sort of service can be offered at viable fares to see if they will actually use these buses.

Present thinking sees the kombis continuing, but servicing feeder routes to main bus stations where people will catch their bus to central terminuses. This may well work in Harare where oddities of town planning have placed most people in five great wedges of housing generally more than 10km from the city centre.

We can see the kombis operating in the wedges and the larger buses linking these with workplaces and the city centre. But it also means that total fares have to be affordable.

We also think that before we spend what is likely to be hundreds of millions of dollars that we try out a pilot scheme, using one of those main wedges of suburbs and find out if the new bus service can be a total replacement for the present system or whether it will cater for certain classes of commuters.

The kombi system, for all its faults, is self-correcting in market terms. No one drives buses when there is no business and numbers on a route rise to meet demand. Indeed, one useful piece of research would be to actually count how many kombi trips are made on each route and then work backwards into what sort of bus fleet might be required.

What we have is not very marvellous; it certainly needs replacement.

But the final fares cannot be any higher, the replacement service has to be at least as flexible when we consider supply and demand. It would obviously be safer and see fewer vehicles on the road, but it needs to be superior all round.

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