The Gauteng government team tasked with drawing up a new 25-year integrated transport plan for the province would go out on tender for a consortium to assist it “in a few weeks”, said task team leader and Gautrain boss Jack van der Merwe on Wednesday.

Speaking at the Intelligent Transport Society of South Africa’s annual general meeting, held in Pretoria, he said the consortium would have to feature small and medium enterprise, as well as black economic-empowerment elements.

Gauteng Roads and Transport MEC Ismail Vadi announced in May that a task team would be appointed to draw up a new 25-year transport plan for the province, mapping future road, freight and rail developments for the economic powerhouse of South Africa.

The current deadline for Van der Merwe’s team to present a five-year plan to Vadi was January 31, 2012, with the 25-year plan to be put on the table in March 2013.

Van der Merwe, who had also played a part in developing the current 50-year transport plan – drawn up in the early 1970s – said he hoped to see a plan which now gave priority to public transport, and which would take into account current and future land-use models.

“We must focus on public transport. We cannot built ourselves out of congestion.”

In a sea change from the PWV (Pretoria–Witwatersrand–Vereeniging) plan he assisted in drawing up, the province was not going to count cars anymore, but the people moving between nodes, Van der Merwe explained.

He said he wanted to see facilities where public transport users could safely and easily transfer from one mode of transport to another.

He added that public transport was in need of greater financial support on a national level. He noted, for example, that Metrorail operated a service from Mabopane to Pretoria, but that it was almost impossible for commuters to freely board and disembark trains at convenient points, as three stations already designed for this line had never been built.

“Prasa [the Metrorail operator] has been underfunded for twenty years. Someone must just approve spending R20-million and build the stations.”

Van der Merwe admitted that current transport planning in the province was “fractured and uncoordinated”.

He also acknowledged that the Gauteng government did not have control over all transport modes, such as air freight, but noted that it could and should deal with the fact that airports created large traffic volumes.

Van der Merwe said the PWV transport plan of the 1970s had been based on a US federal highway transportation model, and, as such, focused almost solely on road infrastructure.

In what remained a familiar lament, however, he said most of the roads identified in this plan were never built, owing to funding constraints.

Van der Merwe emphasised that he did not want a repeat performance of this, noting that any process lost credibility if too much time passed between planning and implementation.

Despite some road reserves identified within the PWV plan still being earmarked for development, they were fast disappearing, he added. For example, the road reserve in Alexandra had been devoured to meet the need for low-cost housing.