The City Mayoral Committee Member for Urban Mobility, Councillor Rob Quintas, addressed the National Transport Conference at the Gallagher Convention Centre in Midrand earlier this afternoon.

It is a privilege to be here today to discuss the bedrock of a functioning economy, namely public transport and I want to, from the outset, challenge the surmise that local governments may not be equipped to manage it.

I invite you to join me on a tour of Cape Town so that you can see what we are achieving.

Our existing first phase of the MyCiTi bus service is the foundation of our municipal transport offering with:

• 65 000 passenger journeys per weekday
• 2,3 million passenger trips per month
• A bus fleet consisting of 347 buses of which 90% are operational at any given time
• A network consisting of 42 stations, and routes covering the CBD and surrounds, the Atlantic Seaboard from Hout Bay to Sea Point, via Camps Bay; and the West Coast from Table View to Atlantis
• The N2 Express service operating four routes from Mitchells Plain and Khayelitsha to the CBD

The next frontier is the second phase of the MyCiTi bus service that will benefit more than 1,4 million residents from the metro-south east, once operational. Many of these residents travel 20km or more daily, there is no direct east-west public transport corridor that provides scheduled public transport; and those wanting to get to Wynberg and Claremont must do so via the CBD.

Phase 2A will address this with a direct, scheduled corridor comprising of:

• 11 closed bus stations
• 17,4 km of dedicated bus rapid transit lanes (the red lanes)
• 22,4 km of roads
• Two new bus depots along Spine Road in Khayelitsha

All bringing more than 30 neighbourhoods onto our network in the second half of 2027.

We can agree that public transport in South Africa has been for too long been treated as a stepchild across various spheres of government, resulting in poor integration and ultimately, a disservice to our commuters.

Local government, however, is at the coalface of service delivery. We are the sphere closest to the commuter, which means we are ideally positioned to be the land-based transport planning authority as is global best practise. But to do this effectively, we need to talk openly about agility, institutional frameworks, and capacity.

A critical question has been asked.

Are local governments equipped to be agile, and does the Municipal Finance Management Act (MFMA) help or hinder this?

On one hand, the MFMA is a crucial piece of legislation. It ensures accountability, transparency, and clean governance. These are principles we take serious in the City of Cape Town. However, when it comes to the daily, fast-paced operational demands of a public transport network, the MFMA absolutely stifles agility and real time response to shocks and stresses.

Because of this local governments must consider Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) or municipal entities to deliver public transport.

Ring-fencing public transport operations into an SPV allows a municipality to retain ultimate oversight and strategic control while allowing the entity to operate with private-sector agility. An SPV can establish its own nimble procurement policies, negotiate operational contracts much faster, and it bridges the gap between local government checklists and the real-time demands of moving hundreds of thousands of people safely and efficiently every day.

The City of Cape Town built its urban transport capacity by bringing planning, network design, infrastructure implementation, operations, and contract management under one roof in the Urban Mobility Directorate.

We aggressively insourced and developed scarce skills from transport economists to data analysts, and specialised contract managers.

We realised that managing Vehicle Operating Companies (VOCs) requires a highly specific commercial skillset that local government typically lacks. Furthermore, we shifted our mindset from ‘road builders’ to being a holistic mobility authority.

This capacity-building has allowed us to manage the MyCiTi network effectively and positions us to take on further responsibilities such as our ongoing, urgent push for the devolution of passenger rail to the municipal level. Cape Town can absolutely deliver integrated, safe, and innovative public transport, but we need clear mandates, the devolution of both function and funding, and the institutional freedom to establish agile operating models.