In the 2013/14 financial year, more than R5-billion will be spent in 13 South African cities on planning, building and operating integrated public transport networks, says Transport Minister Dipuo Peters.

She says Cape Town and Johannesburg have already constructed more than 20 km of dedicated bus rapid transport (BRT) lanes, supported by more than 100 km of feeder and distribution services.

In the 2013/14 financial year, Cape Town and Johannesburg will expand operations on the Rea Vaya and My CiTi services respectively to do up to 100 000 passenger trips a day on each system.

Rea Vaya buses currently transport an average of 40 000 people to and from work daily.

Peters says BRT systems are catalysts for “urban regeneration, reconnecting isolated nodes and bringing disconnected communities closer to economic opportunities”.

She says the George municipality, in the Western Cape, is a new entrant into the bus “public transport network development enter-prise”. George will, however, complete its citywide network at a more modest scale than the networks being constructed in the major metropolitan areas.

Buffalo City, Ekurhuleni, Mangaung, Msunduzi and Polokwane are all set to complete their public transport network devel-opment planning and service contract designs during the course of the 2013/14 financial year, starting with network development in the 2014/15 financial year, says Peters.

The target date for the completion of the feasibility study on a transport solution for the Moloto corridor was set for March 10 next year.

The Moloto corridor stretches from Mpumalanga into the Tshwane metro. Around 35 000 commuters are transported to Tshwane in the mornings, using 536 subsidised buses, with the same number travelling the roughly 100 km back to Mpumalanga in the evening.

“Commuters spend long hours in transit, with some, in extreme cases, spending up to seven hours per day on buses,” says Peters.

Exacerbating this situation is the lack of economic development and job opportunities along the corridor.

“This is considered to be an unsustainable situation. The Department [of Transport] has conducted a feasibility study into options to mitigate the situation,” says Peters.

Rail is one option being considered. The Moloto corridor project has been registered with Treasury as a public–private partnership project. It also forms part of Strategic Inte-grated Project 1 of the Presidential Infrastruc- ture Coordinating Commission, with the objec-tive of unlocking the Northern Mineral Belt.