Safer Routes to Public Transport in South Africa
- 3 days ago
- 4 min read
At the UITP Africa Conference in Johannesburg, the TRANS-SAFE and eBRT2030 projects came together for a session exploring how we can make the entire journey to and from public transport safer.
The discussion looked beyond safety on board a bus or in a station. For passengers, the journey begins well before they board. It may involve walking along an informal footpath, crossing a high-speed road, cycling to an interchange or waiting at a stop. It also involves questions of personal security and whether passengers feel safe throughout their journey.
These issues are particularly important in cities, where public transport provides essential access to jobs, education and services, but where the first and last parts of the journey can expose passengers to both road safety and personal security risks.
The session brought these different dimensions together through presentations from Keresha Naidoo of the City of Cape Town and Verlene Manuel-Watson, National Deputy Chairlady of the South African Network of Women in Transport (SANWIT).
Cape Town: making safety part of an integrated mobility system
Cape Town's presentation highlighted why safer access to public transport cannot be addressed through isolated infrastructure interventions. Every public transport trip in Cape Town includes at least one walking leg. Yet walking and cycling infrastructure often does not begin or end at a public transport station or stop, leaving the critical first and last mile dangerous or, in some locations, effectively absent. Other challenges include unpaved sidewalks, poorly maintained facilities, illegal parking on walking and cycling infrastructure, inadequate universal access, and cycling facilities that do not provide sufficient protection from motorised traffic.
Cape Town is seeking to address these challenges through a more systemic approach. Its draft Road Safety Strategy sets out a vision of a road network in which all people are safe and feel safe. Guided by the Safe System Approach, the City is looking at sustained improvements across road user behaviour, safer and more forgiving infrastructure, safer vehicles and stronger road safety governance, with the ambition of reducing the road traffic fatality rate to below 10 deaths per 100,000 population.
Importantly, this road safety ambition sits within a wider transformation of mobility planning. Cape Town's Walking and Cycling Strategy, approved in 2025, represents a deliberate move away from ad hoc interventions towards strategic and integrated planning. Its longer-term ambition is a walkable, cyclable and people-centred city in which most trips are made by public and active transport and mobility is safe, equitable and affordable for all.
Connecting active mobility and public transport
A particularly important message from Cape Town was that active mobility and public transport need to be planned as parts of the same system. The City is developing city-wide walking and cycling network plans alongside its public transport network. This includes analysing walking catchments around public transport interchanges and the Integrated Public Transport Network, overlaying active mobility routes with public transport routes to identify gaps and opportunities, and identifying priority corridors where improved public transport access and cycling investments can be delivered together.
BRT is an important component of this approach, but not the only one. Cape Town has already delivered shared active mobility facilities along MyCiTi BRT routes and incorporates walking and cycling into BRT corridor design standards. The wider ambition is to create a connected multimodal network rather than treating BRT, cycling and walking as separate systems.
This means thinking differently about what makes a route successful. Cape Town's emerging walking network approach considers not only connectivity and directness, but actual and perceived safety, comfort, attractiveness, spatial integration, user experience and socio-economic value.
It also means recognising that infrastructure alone is not sufficient. Cape Town identified behaviour change, governance, enforcement and security as integral parts of the active mobility system. Planned measures include secure bicycle parking at public transport interchanges, better integration with interchange upgrades, focused enforcement and security, community safety initiatives and closer alignment of investment in roads, public transport and active mobility.
From safer routes to safer operations
The second presentation, from Verlene Manuel-Watson, shifted the discussion towards operational and personal safety. Her presentation demonstrated the potential role of technology in providing early warnings and rapid responses to safety and security incidents. The tools presented included networked panic devices and monitoring systems designed to support passengers, drivers and public transport infrastructure.
For public transport environments, the presentation highlighted applications for protecting infrastructure such as bus stops, terminals, yards and workshops, alongside solutions for vehicles and drivers.
For passengers specifically, the tools included panic alerts at bus terminals for medical emergencies, security incidents, accidents and requests for assistance, as well as fire and smoke detection. On-board solutions included driver and passenger panic alerts using different combinations of radio frequency, GPS, GSM and mobile-phone-based technologies.
The presentation reinforced an important point from the wider session: safe mobility is both about being safe and feeling safe. A well-designed route to a station will not fulfil its purpose if passengers fear using the station or waiting for a bus. Equally, sophisticated security technology cannot compensate for an unsafe road crossing or a walking route that exposes passengers to fast-moving traffic.
This combination of perspectives reflects the approach being advanced through TRANS-SAFE; that improving road safety requires a system that considers infrastructure, behaviour and the experiences of the people using the transport network.
TRANS-SAFE has been developing tools, resources and approaches to support safer mobility, helping cities and mobility stakeholders translate Safe System principles into practical action. The discussion in Johannesburg demonstrated why such tools need to address the transport journey as a whole, from planning and designing safer routes to understanding risks, supporting implementation and strengthening the capacity of authorities and transport stakeholders to respond to safety challenges.
Mobility & Access plan - Project Superblock Central on Bree Street
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