The City of Cape Town will introduce a number of new routes and bus stops to its MyCiti bus service, starting October 27.
“Our transport planners recently conducted a review of the MyCiTi service and the passenger demand on the MyCiTi routes,” says Cape Town Transport and Urban Development MMC Brett Herron.
“We also undertook customer surveys to determine how we could attract even more commuters to the service.
“The outcome of the review and the survey informed us of where we needed to tweak the service to respond to our commuters’ needs and to better match the service with the passenger demand.”
The MyCiTi bus service currently covers, on average, 1.5-million kilometres a month.
With the planned changes and extension of routes, the city will add another 150 000 km to the service.
“By adding another 150 000 km to the service each month, we will bring the MyCiTi service closer to more commuters and to where there is a demand,” says Herron.
“For example, we will extend popular routes in the inner city, Table View, Atlantis and Century City with 29 new bus stops.”
Some underutilised stops will also no longer be served.
Also, some of the routes will be replaced with new direct routes to popular destinations. For example, a new route will serve District Six and Zonnebloem; three new stops will be added to serve the Parklands East area; a direct route will operate from Table View to Duynefontein via Melkbosstrand and numerous stops have been added to the routes in Atlantis to better serve Beacon Hill and Sherwood.
Herron says it is important to note that all of the new stops will be temporary for a few months, in order for the city to monitor passenger demand and the suitability of the location before spending money on permanent infrastructure.
He expects the new direct routes to destinations such as the V&A Waterfront and Sea Point to be popular as no transfers will be required.
“The purpose of these changes is to improve the MyCiTi service to make it more convenient for commuters and easier to use,” he adds.
“Cities are constantly evolving and Cape Town is no different. People move around and adjust their lifestyles, and public transport services around the world must respond to these changes.”
The MyCiti service transports an average of 60 913 passengers on a weekday.
Since its launch in May 2010 until August 2018, about 89.4-million passenger journeys were recorded on the service.
Schedule adherence on the trunk routes was 95% in August, meaning that the MyCiTi buses departed and arrived on time and in accordance with the time schedule 95% of the time.