Abstract:
Previous research that explored the economic facilitating role of passenger transport used
one or two transport proxies to do so, and mostly reported their findings at country level,
providing little insight into this relationship within a country. This paper addresses this
knowledge gap as it discusses the facilitating role of public and private passenger
transport for economic activity in metro, urban and rural areas in South Africa, with specific
emphasis on the greater Cape Town region. Economic activity data was obtained from the
StepSA 2018 dataset in the form of Gross Value Added index values per mesozone.
Passenger transport data was obtained from the National Household Travel Survey 2020
dataset, with a sample size of nearly 150 000 South African respondents, to extract data of
multiple passenger transport proxies including: (i) Travel time to five destinations (work,
education, grocery and other shops and public transport); (ii) Travel cost to two
destinations (work and education); and (iii) Access to private motorised transport. Spatial
mapping, means analysis and correlation analysis were performed to demonstrate the
relationship between economic activity and passenger transport travel behaviour. This
required the disaggregation of the NHTS 2020 dataset to create detailed maps depicting
passenger transport travel behaviour in South Africa, a first of its kind. Using the
aforementioned analysis and data, this paper concludes the following: (i) The relationship
between economic activity and travel time is moderately inverse but differs based on travel
destinations; (ii) The relationship between economic activity and travel cost to work and
education is direct and likely attributable to better paying jobs and education located in
metros and urban areas; (iii) The relationship between economic activity and access to
private motorised vehicles is direct and the strongest in metros. This paper proposes that
South African authorities prioritise passenger transport investments in an effort to reduce
travel cost in metros as this investment will yield greater economic activity returns
compared to investments in an effort to improve travel cost in urban and rural areas or
travel time or transport access to private motorised vehicles.
