The City of Cape Town is pulling out all the stops to reduce traffic in the metro, including the introduction of flexible working hours and allowing officials to work from home.
The strategy meant to reduce traffic volumes will be presented to council for approval by the end of March. The plan suggests that the private sector should explore the introduction of compressed work weeks, and proposes incentives for carpooling and public transport use.
Furthermore, the city says increasing the cost of parking and ultimately reducing the availability of parking bays counts among the interventions to reduce the attractiveness of private vehicle use to business districts.
The Mother City is one of the most congested cities in the world. Dutch navigation equipment maker TomTom recently rated Cape Town as the most congested city in SA and 47th internationally on its list of the world’s most congested cities.
Brett Herron, Cape Town’s mayoral committee member responsible for transport, said on Wednesday the city would spend R750m on road infrastructure projects over five years to address congestion in various routes. However, building new roads alone would not solve this challenge in the long term, said Herron.
"Experience the world over has proven that new road capacity is usually taken up within a matter of months and that construction cannot stay ahead of the growing demand due to rapid urbanisation. As such, interventions to address and change commuter behaviour — how and when they travel — are needed to complement the city’s road infrastructure projects," said Herron.
He said the only way out of constant gridlock is by changing travel patterns and over-reliance on private vehicles.
"The strategy proposes practical solutions. For example, by implementing flexible working hours or remote working arrangements for employees, we will have fewer private vehicles on the arterial routes during the traditional peak-hour periods."
"The city will lead by example. As a large employer, we expect our implementation of this strategy to lead the way and in the next few months some officials will be allowed to work remotely from satellite offices for a number of days or hours a week, to begin and end working at nonstandard times within limits set by management, or to work from home during the peak and then travel to work during the off-peak period.
"I will also share these proposals with our counterparts at the Western Cape government, which employs a large number of officials who travel to the Cape Town CBD everyday," said Herron
Many residents spend three hours on the city’s arterial routes during the peak-hour traffic periods because historic and inflexible working hours require them to start and finish working between 8am and 5pm. Cape Town’s spatial and geographical layout also exacerbates traffic congestion because commuters travel in the same direction towards centres of employment, said Herron.
"We therefore need the private sector to investigate how they can better manage their employees’ working hours. Apart from working from home or flexi-hours, private businesses can allow some employees to work a compressed work week. This means fitting a five-day work week into four days instead. Apart from alleviating congestion, spending less time on the roads will improve employees’ productivity and lifestyles significantly."
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