The City of Cape Town has called for urgent funding certainty, amid reports that the national Government is phasing out the Public Transport Network Grant (PTNG), which the Metro says threatens the viability of the MyCiTi bus service and could halt expansion plans.
Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis has written to Transport Minister Barbara Creecy and Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana to get clarity on the matter.
Hill-lewis says Cape Town’s MyCiTi is the most successful service of its kind, accounting for 42% of all passenger trips on Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) nationally.
However, uncertainty over national grant funding jeopardises both existing MyCiTi bus services and the major new Cape Flats route expansion, set to benefit over 1,4 million residents across 30 neighbourhoods, from Mitchells Plain and Khayelitsha, to Wynberg and Claremont.
“MyCiTi ridership has grown by 68% since 2021 to 23 million passenger trips annually, and is set to reach 30 million once the Cape Flats extension begins operating.”
The Mayor says while he understands the need for national funding reforms, especially where other BRT systems have failed, successful bus services, like the MyCiTi, must be protected for the sake of the commuters who rely on them.
“The state should not throw out the baby with the bathwater, by cutting funding to successful BRT services along with all the unsuccessful ones.”
Hill-Lewis says long-term certainty and performance-based funding for MyCiTi and other successful programmes are required.
R7,1 billion has already been committed to infrastructure for the new Cape Flats route expansion. The next step is to convert this new infrastructure into actual passenger service, including bus fleet procurement, which is now at risk due to national cuts to the PTNG, which is set to be phased out at the end of 2027/28.
During Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana’s delivery of the 2025 Medium Term Budget Policy Statement (MTBPS) on 12 November, he confirmed the PTNG had not met its objective, and it will be replaced with better-targeted support.
R8.4 billion will be cut over three years from underperforming metro projects.
Since the 2010/11 financial year, the government has allocated about R84 billion in grant funding to projects in cities including Cape Town, Johannesburg, Tshwane, Ekurhuleni, eThekwini, George, Nelson Mandela Bay, Polokwane, and Rustenburg.
