Can bus transit cut poverty?

Mega-cities in South America and Africa have many slums that surround the inner-city. People within these slums often have to travel quite a distance to their jobs in more industrial parts of the city. To solve this problem, a few mega-cities have built fast bus systems to get the poor to their jobs at a low cost.

Critics however are questioning the effectiveness of these new transit systems. They have backed up their concerns with some studies showing that the bus lines benefit the middle class instead.

From this IPS story that we found at All Africa, writer Gail Jennings looks into this issue. 

Bus Rapid Transit, sometimes referred to as "rail on road" systems, are high-quality, high-capacity bus systems with their own right-of-way, dedicated bus lanes.

Today the TransMilenio in Bogota, Colombia carries around 1.6 million passengers every day, over 84 kilometres of segregated busway. In Curitiba, Brazil, about 70 percent of commuters use the BRT, and around 30 percent of passengers are "converted" private car users.

It is upon purportedly transformative systems such as these that the cities of Johannesburg, Tshwane and Cape Town in South Africa, Lagos in Nigeria and Nairobi in Kenya have pinned their transport hopes and dreams.

Early phases of multi-million dollar capital projects are operating in Johannesburg and Cape Town, and are set to soon launch in at least four other cities in South Africa.

But while it is too early to draw long-term conclusions about the impact of these transport systems, a number of researchers are asking questions and coming up with some answers about their ability to contribute to national goals of alleviating poverty.

James Chakwizira, a senior researcher in the built infrastructure department at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), told IPS that although these high-quality services do have great potential for addressing public transport challenges within communities, the current initiatives such as Johannesburg's three-year-old system, Rea Vaya, fall short of expectations.

He said because terminal infrastructure developments are located away from the marginal communities' location, people from these areas need to use a minimum of two transport modes in order to access and use the routes.

Growth of African cities beginning to slow

One of the common perceptions about Africa is that the cities are growing out of control. People flee the rural areas because there are more jobs in the city. But recent research is indicating that this growth is starting to slow down, because of a lack of jobs in the urban areas.

From Reuters Alert Net writer Laurie Goering attended a presentation covering the new data.

Contrary to expectations, countries like Ivory Coast, Mali, Zambia and Central African Republic have seen periods in the last 20 years when more city dwellers have moved to rural areas than vice versa, said Deborah Potts, a Kings College London demographer who looks at urbanisation trends in sub-Saharan Africa.

In many parts of the region, “you have tremendous counter-movements out of the cities back to rural areas… because people are finding it really hard to find livelihoods that will sustain them in the cities,” she said during a presentation at the Chatham House think tank in London.

This outwards migration has slowed the expected rate of population growth in some African cities such as Lagos, Potts said. That could have important implications for urban planners and for national preparations to deal with climate change.

The lack of jobs in African cities may also challenge widely held assumptions that rural families hit by increasingly extreme weather will be able to adapt by moving to cities or sending family members to work there.

Farmers affected by worsening droughts may move to towns or cities, Potts said, but “there are no livelihood activities for them and if there are no such activities, they will just be refugees. That’s a different kind of urbanisation.”

In fact, faced with food shortages and weather disasters like flooding, African city dwellers may actually move - temporarily or permanently - to rural areas to try to cope, said Deborah Sporton, an Africa expert and human geography lecturer at Britain’s University of Sheffield.