After two years negotiating with the local minibus taxi industry, the City of Cape Town is now helping prepare taxi drivers to become the first bus drivers for the IRT system.

The City is working in partnership with Volvo, the company providing the IRT buses, and Transpeninsula Investments, the operating company running IRT bus services for the World Cup, to train 130 new bus drivers for this purpose.

The World Cup IRT service will comprise bus services between the large IRT station at the Civic Centre and IRT stations at the Cape Town International Airport and Cape Town Stadium, as well as a smaller ‘feeder service’ around the city bowl area that will have passengers embarking and disembarking at clearly marked kerbside points.

The drivers are all licensed and experienced but, to be certain they have the necessary skills to deliver a safe and efficient service, they have been required to repeat the full licensing process starting with compulsory training for their learners’ licences. They have already completed their written tests and are now taking driving courses through Volvo for their Code 11 and Code 14 licences, which they are being tested on in batches over several weekends.

The City’s Traffic Department has played a key role in helping this process to run smoothly, providing extra capacity at a testing station to ensure that the drivers’ testing does not come at the expense of residents.

Once basic training and refresher courses are complete the drivers will be given further training in how to use the specialised IRT buses, particularly docking smoothly against stations. The buses and stations are custom-designed to fit together so that their doors open at the same time and passengers can walk between them across a very small gap with no step. Wheelchair users will also be able to move between the station and the bus with ease.

Zainunesha Mohamed, a transport transition specialist working for the City who deals directly with the taxi industry, says the process has been extremely positive and describes how other drivers have been queuing up to be trained after the first group was chosen by operators.

“Everybody’s been saying that it’s not really going to happen, so it was a pie-in-the-sky thing for them, and there was less substance to the discussions. But now you can see it out there,” says Mohamed. “The questions we are getting now are constructive, rather than critical. We can see that the truth about how the system works for everyone will eventually win the day, because people are starting to understand what it’s really about.”

For former drivers the IRT will offer much greater financial security and regulated working conditions, without the pressure of chasing customers and sometimes having to pay rent for the minibus taxis they drive.

Mohamed says training and education will form a key part of the City’s support and will help operators make the transition to a new business approach that has high levels of customer service as its main focus. The City has also provided taxi associations with business, legal and accounting advisors to assist them in setting up companies to fulfil operator contracts in the new system.