Taken for a ride

It hasn't been a good month for South African motorists. If you haven't been driving around from station to station being met by abandoned pumps due to strike action, then the new “green tax” has likely put a damper on any plans to get a shiny new set of wheels.

The carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions tax on vehicles, effective from last week, sees buyers of new cars forking out R75 for each gram per kilogram of CO2 emitted above 120g/km. That translates into an estimated R1 500 more on the purchase price of a small passenger car, and as much as R20 000 on a petrol-guzzling 4X4.

While global warming and climate change have been issues people could relatively easily ignore in their day-to-day doings, it's now been thrust into the centre of important buying decisions in the form of something few of us can escape - tax.

With an actual rands-and-cents motivation to consider alternative forms of transport, electric cars may just have found their place in the sun. Big name manufacturers have seen the gap, with the likes of Nissan, Chevrolet and Ford all rolling out their commercial EV models in coming months, most of which boast zero or drastically reduced emissions.

Which all sounds great, but let's get practical for a minute. Let's say you buy an electric car, which is still on the pricey side, but it begins paying for itself pretty soon, and there's no tax in sight. You drive around a bit. You drive around some more. The battery starts running low. You begin scouting around for the nearest filling sta... oh, wait.

Infrastructure. Here's the big gaping hole in the future of electric vehicles in the country. For people to switch to cleaner, greener cars they need to be able to recharge just as easily as filling up at the local Engen, Shell, or B... er, scratch that, Caltex.

Unless some effort is made to support cleaner means of transport, the CO2 tax is just punishing consumers without providing a viable alternative for those who actually want to make a change.

Perhaps then it's wiser to take the focus off individually owned and driven cars as our chief means of getting around. Transportation forms the backbone of an efficient economy and is one of the dirtiest, most stressful, time-consuming and wasteful activities we conduct every day. But it doesn't have to be.

Efficient, environmentally friendly, safe, affordable public transport should not be some ideal for other people, for first-world countries with money and modern technology. That is too convenient an excuse for such a monumental problem.

The fact is, it's not just about changing our cars and driving habits - transport as a whole has to undergo massive restructuring. We can't plan a 21st century future based on 20th century transport networks. A lot of research and energy has been ploughed into the concept of smarter, more efficient transport, with information technology serving as the nerve system holding it together.

There's a pressing need for transportation to evolve from a dumb, dispersed hardware model to a highly connected, real-time integration of “hardware”, “software”, society and environment. This is already happening in cities such as Singapore and South Korea, where new systems merge ITC with air, rail, road, and water transport networks, as wells as citizens' needs, to fine-tune the efficient running of it all.

One thing driving the need for better public transport is the fact that populations are soaring and, with current roads already straining under traffic loads, we simply cannot afford to add more cars. Factor in the swelling of our cities, as more people become urbanised, and you have a problem that threatens to overwhelm.

It's not just about changing our cars and driving habits - transport as a whole has to undergo massive restructuring.

Lezette Engelbrecht, copy editor and journalist, ITWeb

Frost & Sullivan reports in a white paper on smarter transportation that developing economies are likely to take the lead in forming mega cities by 2020, as their populations explode. It points to the blurring boundaries of Johannesburg and Pretoria as an example of an emerging mega city, with road networks being the primary means of transport - and we all know how effective those are.

Another driver is the fact that everything is becoming more converged and connected, with technology serving as the invisible thread linking people to their world. It's merely a case of adapting technological tools to local circumstances. If we had a widespread, well-functioning bus system, for example, why not create a free mobile service that allows people to find the nearest station and timetable on their cellphone. Or even purchase a ticket ahead of time using the increasing number of mobile money solutions entering the market.

There are opportunities everywhere, and in a country with sky-high unemployment, mass dependence on public transport, and a commitment to drastically reduce CO2 emissions in the next decade, they need to start being realised.

This is an opportune and pivotal time to combine the increased focus on responsible, sustainable transport, with recent gains in physical and communications infrastructure.

Policies like the green tax and even the planned tolling system demonstrate encouraging moves towards less carbon-intensive travel. At the same time, the World Cup has left SA with considerably upgraded information and communications systems, along with revamped road and rail networks. All that's needed is to connect the dots.

Compel people to travel in a more sustainable fashion, sure, but then also use the masses of newly built infrastructure to enable it.

The winds of change are slowly blowing, it would seem, with the president's trip to China last month resulting in an MOU for possible investment in a public transport project. This would see an upgrade of SA's aging rail network, by introducing new stock and technology, as well as a possible high-speed rail link between Durban and Johannesburg.

Getting from A to B and back is something that continues to sustain both global economies and individual livelihoods. Unless SA starts getting serious about aligning its environmental strategies with smarter, smoother and cleaner transport, it risks literally being left behind as rest of the world races ahead in high-speed trains and bus-rail hybrid models. If it's ultimately all about the journey, as the saying goes, why not make it a quick, low-carbon, stress-free one?

Lezette Engelbrecht, copy editor and journalist, doesn't see why in a world experiencing leaps in so many other areas - communication, computing power, working habits, transport remains such a technological dinosaur. With CO2 from transport making up a fifth of total global emissions, moving to cleaner systems will have a huge bearing on the planet's increasing temperatures, not to mention those of the millions of motorists who spend countless hours in traffic every day.