Paper presented at the 33rd Annual Southern African Transport Conference 7-10 July 2014 "Leading Transport into the Future", CSIR International Convention Centre, Pretoria, South Africa.
In South Africa, the bench mark for transport expenditure is 10% of monthly income. In the
global South “transport poverty” is not a foreign concept considering that most individuals
use more than 10% of their income on transport. The driver of these high transport costs is
the positioning of economic activities relative to residential areas. Additionally, concerns
over Peak Oil and its impact on fuel price means transport will become even more
unaffordable in the future. Using Cape Town as a study area, this paper explores the
concept of “too much” choice in a job choice framework to investigate the hypothesis that,
the provision of a large catchment area from which individuals seek jobs does not continue
to yield an increase in utility, but that there is a point beyond which benefits from having
more choice are negligible. The results suggest that in a job choice framework, an
increase in catchment size does not result in an increase in utility, instead as the
catchment size increases utility decreases. It is therefore concluded that there is an
amount of accessibility that cities can provide that can be considered to be “sufficient” and
still enable individuals to attain positive utility. From the findings in this study, providing
“sufficient” accessibility can be achieved by locating future urban growth thereby reducing
home to work distances which may translate to a reduction in transport costs.
