Zimpapers Logo

There has been a recent surge in the never-ending debate on Harare’s bus terminuses following the death of a passenger pushed around by touts at one of the long distance terminuses on the edge of the central business district.

The latest ideas, from both Government and the Harare City Council, is to move terminuses. These ideas appear to be generated by people who drive cars into the city centre, not people who need to use buses and kombis or prefer to use buses and kombis. The potential passengers usually need to board buses near the city centre where they work or where they have come from their home to one terminus in order to find a bus at a near-by terminus that will take them to their final destination.

Despite all the changes and the prophecies of decline, the CBD is still easily the largest conglomeration of employment and business in Harare and Zimbabwe; so a lot of people need to come in every day and leave every day. But even someone working in Borrowdale, an area of rapid growth and increasing job opportunities, but who lives in say Glen View has to use one bus to reach the city centre and one to reach Borrowdale and does not need more than a kilometre-walk between the drop-off point and the load point. So the CBD is both a destination and the interchange. So what can be done?

Harare City Council is not totally hopeless. A few years ago parking was a disaster, with vandalised car parks open to thieves, double parking and illegal parking everywhere, parking garages that appeared to be public toilets and touts bullying drivers. Decisions were made and within a couple of months everything changed. Admittedly, external experts set things up, but the council soon took over and now runs a credible parking business. Parking garages are guarded by polite men and women; car parks are properly fenced and secured and are safe; street parking is tightly controlled by council employees on every block.

It is the same sort of concepts that are needed for public transport. A couple of years ago, the council had the excellent idea of having holding areas outside the CBD where kombis and buses could park with officials at the CBD terminuses and loading points calling in buses and kombis as they were required, so that there would not be more than two or three vehicles for a particular route queuing at the terminus or loading point.

This needs to be enforced. At the same time terminuses need to be secured, so touts cannot enter. Passengers wanting to go somewhere would be able to stroll into a safe area, find the next bus going their way, climb aboard and go, without worry.

Some terminuses in the city centre are better run than others, largely where the bus operators have agreed on rules and keep them, but more could be done by the council itself. The costs would be modest and a $1 a day fee for kombis would probably fund it. Decent signposting and a terminus map would also help. In other words we need better control of terminuses and those sections of roads that perform a similar function, rather than abolishing them and making people walk several kilometres into the city centre.

Around the world major cities are working on how to make public transport better, safer and more efficient so that everyone will agree to use these services. The ideal in much of the developed world is for people to leave their cars at home and come to work on the train, the metro, the bus or the tram rather than clog streets. And to an extent this is working.

Harare needs to rethink its approach. Banning buses to make car traffic easier is neither friendly to the majority nor all that sensible; if everyone who works in the city centre used a car there would be a solid jam, regardless of how few buses were allowed.And the first step in sorting out the problems is to accept that most people need to use public transport and need to get into the city centre on such transport, preferably in one journey. Then planners can work out how this can be done and, most importantly, how it can be properly organised. We believe the problem is not the buses or even the touts. It is the total lack of organisation that allows bus operators to do as they please and allows touts to be a nuisance. Put in a decent organisation and the problems diminish to almost nothing while the benefits remain.