The economic facilitating role of passenger transport in South Africa

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.