Tag Archives: Ratepayers

World Design Capital 2014 & New7Wonders of Nature: have Cape Town ratepayers been conned?

Cape Town StadiumIn the Cape Times on Tuesday Glenn Babb, a former Director General of Foreign Affairs, and a commissioner for our country at the Venice Biennale in 1993 and 1995, wrote a lengthy article about the City of Cape Town having paid millions of Rands to support two money-making organisations handing out accolades to those cities prepared to pay for them, and which most had not been heard of previously.  The City had justified the expenditures, funded by means of ratepayers’ monies, on the basis of the tourism benefits these accolades would hold for Cape Town.

Bitingly entitled ‘Cape Town’s Devious Designs’, Babb focused on Table Mountain becoming one of the New7Wonders of Nature.  He writes that the Swiss-based company New7Wonders of Nature Foundation, which drove the campaign, makes its money from the sms-revenue generated when the citizens of cities are encouraged to vote to get one’s landmark onto the top seven list.  The company claimed that it had received 100 million votes, each of which had generated income for the company. The City of Cape Town had spent extensive monies on advertising to support the campaign to get Capetonians to vote. Continue reading →

MyCiTi Bus losses: will Cape Town ratepayers have to pay?

My CiTi Bus imagesA hard-hitting Open Letter to Cape Town Mayor Patricia de Lille and Councillor Brett Herron was published in the Letters page of the Cape Times last week, and echoes many of our observations about the failure of the MyCiTi Bus service on the city centre and Camps Bay routes.  The newspaper also published a defensive response from Councillor Brett Herron, Mayoral Committee member for Transport and ultimately responsible for the city’s public transport service.

Emiritus Professor of Forensics at UCT Deon Knobel, a respected pathologist and lecturer, has observed, as have we (we have Tweeted this regularly) that the MyCiTi Buses travelling in Camps Bay and along Kloof Street are still close to empty three months after the inception of the routes.  Our blogpost after a trial trip from Camps Bay to the Silo section (previously called the Clocktower) of the V&A Waterfront highlighted that the trip took too long (90 minutes one way), and that commuters who wanted to get onto the bus did not have a MyCiTi Bus card with which to pay for their trip.  Extensive queues are still seen in Camps Bay, waiting for taxis, despite the MyCiTi Bus charging next to nothing!

Professor Knobel’s letter documented his observations over the last month in Gardens, Kloof Street, Kloofnek Road, and Camps Bay that not one of the MyCiTi Buses had ‘more than five or six passengers in the bus, and not infrequently no more than three or four. One bus even carried the amazing figure of one passenger’.  In addition, he had observe eight ‘virtually empty‘ buses on the N2 highway, returning to the city from the airport.  Given the poor occupancy of the MyCiTi Buses, Professor Knobel asked De Lille and Herron the following questions: Continue reading →