A couple of weeks ago, president Ramaphosa decided to connect with the people by using public transport in Pretoria.

He decided to take the train.

Instead of reaching his destination hassle-free, he was sardined in a packed carriage and forced to wait out a three-hour delay.

He came to the obvious conclusion that rail transport in South Africa is “very bad”.

According to Moneyweb, the latest Passenger Rail Agency of SA (Prasa) report actually reveals that it’s worse than we thought.

Prasa chair Khanyisile Kweyama states in one of the first paragraphs that Prasa actually fails to fulfil its primary mandate of transporting passengers.

According to Kweyama, Prasa is “almost broken and is fraught with a myriad of issues and challenges ranging from its failure to deliver on its primary mandate, investigations arising out of allegations of maladministration and corruption, poor internal controls and the slow roll-out of the capital programme meant to transform rail travel”. She admits that the business is broken and near total collapse.

Much like the trains, apparently. Here are some sobering stats:

On average, 13% of all scheduled trains are cancelled and a massive 68% of trains operated on any given day are running late. The average delay during 2018 was 30 minutes. Only 50% of the trains running are full train sets with a minimum of 12 coaches each.

A quick calculation using these figures shows that Prasa is indeed not close to doing what it should. If Prasa schedules 1 000 trains, 130 will be cancelled. Of the 870 trains that run, 594 will be running late. That leaves 267 trains arriving at their destination on time – less than 27% of the original schedule. Only 50% of these will be complete sets with the required number of passenger coaches.

On average, only 138 out of every 1 000 trains managed to meet its objective between March 2017 and March 2018.

Management blames the availability of running stock. “The unavailability and unreliability of rolling stock and infrastructure, which are key enablers to regular, reliable and on-time train services, can no longer guarantee that rail is the backbone of public transport,” says Kweyama.

It gets worse. Six months after the report was ready to be released, the number of train sets had decreased to 174, of which only 50% were correctly configured with 12 coaches.

“This happened despite the general overhaul programme and repair interventions that amounted to billions of rands,” the chairperson wrote in the annual report, which was personally addressed to transport minister Blade Nzimande.

“Currently, Metrorail transports less than 700 000 passengers per week day, while the system is capable of transporting between 2.5 million and three million passengers daily.” In fact, Prasa did transport 2.6 million passengers in 2013.

For a full breakdown of everything that is wrong with Prasa, go here.

In summary, this is a railway company trying to operate in the midst of corruption, incompetence and economic instability.

As usual, it’s the people who suffer.

[source:moneyweb]