Ministerial War Room on PRASA is a game changer for passenger rail

8 August 2019

The continued decline of the quality of service PRASA provides to the commuting public requires urgency in the interventions we put in place. The focus of the 6th administration is on accelerated implementation, working with all South Africans and the Prasa intervention resonates with this. The urgency of addressing Prasa’s turn-around cannot be overemphasized and tangible results that people can see must be realized in the shortest possible time.

Government has a Constitutional obligation to ensure that citizens’ rights as enshrined in the Bill of Rights are not eroded when they use public transport. These include a right to a safe, reliable and secure public transport. When commuters lose jobs as a result of chronic delays and cancellations of trains, their rights are affected. When commuters are injured, maimed or killed in the trains, their rights are affected. We are therefore under no illusion about our obligations to transport our people safely, in a manner that enables sustainable livelihoods.

As we celebrate Women’s month and pay homage to the brave women who stood up against apartheid tyranny, it is only fitting that we pledge our commitment to delivering a passenger rail service that transports our people in a safe and dignified manner.

The War Room we are unveiling today will be a game changer through which we will aggressively improve the quality of our passenger rail service. This is a culmination of a commitment we made to move with speed in addressing critical challenges in our passenger rail environment. This is in line with the Khawuleza ethos that underpins our work and grounded on the principle of accelerated service delivery. This War Room is about the people and a key measure in delivering on our commitment to improve our public transport system.

This room that hosts the War Room is a physical space that will enable those deployed to the War Room to make rapid decisions based on the information they gather from the operations on the ground, on an hour by hour basis. The screens reflect metrics that the Technical Team will utilize to track and measure performance daily.

As a build-up to this launch, this morning we visited the signal cabin in Germiston, which embodies the challenges PRASA faces in controlling train movement using outdated technology, prone to human error due to the chronic cable theft that affects the daily movement of trains.

We later visited the Gauteng Nerve Centre in Tembisa, a state-of-the-art facility that will enable PRASA to monitor the entirety of the Gauteng network from one location and enable rapid response when challenges in the network arise.

The War Room will focus on 3 areas:

The first is Service Recovery, paying particular attention on rolling stock availability and reliability, infrastructure availability and reliability and train performance.

As part of Service Recovery intervention, the War Room will direct its efforts towards the realisation of the following targets by 31 December:

- Improve on-time performance of Metrorail to 85%, currently at 50.2%. Getting people to work and centres of economic activity on time does not only enable a productive population, but also ensures sustainable livelihoods.

- Improve on-time arrivals of Shosholoza Meyl to above 50%, currently at 3%. Shosholoza Meyl has been an important enabler of those who travel from far flung and rural Provinces to access work opportunities and indeed business prospects in urban centres for many decades. These are people who cannot afford other modes of transport and depend on long distance trains to make a living.

- Ensure Metrorail train set availability is at 291 train sets, currently at 157.

Overcrowding in trains due to insufficient number of train sets on any given day creates a fertile ground for criminal activity and injuries in our commuter rail environment.

- Improve locomotive availability of Shosholoza Meyl to 60%, currently below 40%. The main driver of poor on-time departures and arrivals for long distance trains is the unavailability of locomotives.

- Achieve 100% correct configuration of train sets, currently at 41%. Trains that have fewer coaches than what a normal train should have contributes greatly to overcrowding.

- Reduce area under speed restrictions to less than 100km of the network, currently at 167km. A large part of the network is under speed restrictions due to ageing infrastructure or other safety issues, resulting in delays. Injecting urgency in addressing these issues will reduce the delays in our trains.

The second focus area is Safety Management, paying particular attention to implementing effective measures to protect rolling stock, staging yards, perway, electrical and signal infrastructure, depots, stations and most importantly, passengers on board our trains. Integral to this is achieving full compliance with the Railway Safety Regulator permit conditions and directives. At the end of July 2019 PRASA missed the opportunity to comply with all the RSR directives in order to secure a 3-year Safety Permit. Instead, PRASA has been granted a 6-months permit with conditions that have to be met within that time frame.

These conditions will form part of the Safety Management workstream in order to keep these on the radar of the War Room. Compliance by PRASA with safety standards and directives is a non-negotiable. The safety of our people on our trains is sacrosanct.

The third focus area is Accelerated implementation of the Modernisation Programme. This entails urgently creating capacity for PRASA to manage capital projects and spend its capital budget to achieve effective sequencing of critical infrastructure that will enable the deployment of the new trains in targeted corridors. This is an area of serious concern. Over the last few years PRASA has been unable to spend to the tune of R18 billion. The budget for the current financial year is R10.2 billion and PRASA has only been able to spend 5% of its current budget at the end of the first quarter.

The War Room will be supported by a Technical Task Team primarily made up of experts with in-depth knowledge and experience in a number of areas, which include train operations, signaling, rolling stock and security.

On a daily basis, the team will start the day with an assessment of the previous day’s performance and identify issues that hamper performance and make decisions on how to resolve these. The relevant officials with delegated authority will action these decisions and report to the War Room through the Daily Status Meetings. Performance will be managed and monitored daily to ensure sustained improvement.

In the Metrorail Regions and Mainline Passenger Services (MLPS), the War Room structure will be replicated and performance information reported on daily. The War Room will go live on Monday, 12 August 2019, enabling us to decisively improve performance in the passenger rail environment.

The Director-General, Alec Moemi, will preside over a top tier component of the War Room responsible for providing leadership, monitoring, unblocking bottlenecks in decision-making and holding the Board and Management accountable for improving performance and making required decisions. This component will include key decision-makers who will present performance reports and measures taken to improve and sustain improved performance on a weekly basis.

The Ministerial War Room will guide and monitor interventions on a weekly basis and will continue to exist until the end of the 2019/20 financial year. The defined targets must be realized by 31 December 2019, and sustained beyond this date.

The War Room will be complemented by a Steering Committee which will deal with long-term issues and sustaining the improved performance out of the War Room intervention.

Issued by Ayanda Allie Paine, Spokesperson, Department of Transport, 8 August 2019