Students' vision on public transport networks:case Cape Town

Abstract

As part of its Transport Studies Programme, the University of Cape Town (UCT) offers a post-graduate course ‘Public Transport Systems Design and Operations Management’. This 20 Credits (200 hours) course includes a major assignment where students, individually, develop a Public Transport (PT) Corridor Plan for a corridor of their choice, although not being an existing or planned IPTN corridor. In the 10 year existence of the course in its current format, over 100 corridor plans have been submitted for different parts of South Africa and some elsewhere on the continent. Listing those locations gives a good indication of the spread of private and/or work origins of students in the Transport Studies Programme, but also gives an indication where PT need improvements from these students’ perspective. Roughly a third of the plans were in the wider Cape Town area. This gives an opportunity to assess a possible future PT network for the City of Cape Town and its surroundings. The proposed future PT network (rail and BRT) would consist of several radial networks around the Cape Town CBD, Bellville, and the townships on the Cape Flats, Khayelitsha and Mitchells Plain, but should also include a radial network around Stellenbosch, although not directly in the City’s responsibility. Furthermore, these submissions could assist the City in their future IPTN planning. There are also lessons to be learned from the common mistakes that the students (who are mostly transport professionals already) make in actual PT planning situations.