This article in The New York Times addresses both the promise but also the difficulties of addressing some of South Africa’s public transportation difficulties through the growth of public buses as a viable form of mass transportation, especially from the distant (for those without vehicles) townships and the urban cores. I am particularly interested in this phenomenon because I am working on a book on bus boycotts in the US and South Africa in the 1940s and 1940s and some of the issues from that era resonate today. De facto residential segregation and poverty re-enforce one another with race as the connecting strand. If South Africa could develop a safe, efficient, accessible, and inexpensive network of bus transportation in urban and suburban areas it would represent a great leap forward for the country and would also symbolize a significant break from the past. Resistance comes from many directions, but the two biggest represent widely different ends of the socioeconomic spectrum. The first is suburban whites who fall into a NIMBY mindset in which racism may not be the explicit motivation, but which lingers not far from the surface for some. The second will come from the country’s combi taxi industry, which itself is riddled with violent internecine struggles and which undoubtedly would find itself with significant competition.
