Johannesburg — Joburg urgently needs a substantial underground rail system to ease the road network and to solidify its sprawling and haphazard growth

SOUTH Africans really love their cars. You can tell this is the case, because you can buy almost anything in Johannesburg without having to actually get out of your car. At any given street corner, you are bound to be accosted by salesmen of every description hoping to flog Rolex watches or Hermes scarves at truly amazingly low prices. As soon as it rains, out come the umbrellas. A sunny day means sunglasses will be thrust at those who have unwisely decided to travel with their windows down. Strangely, whatever the weather, you always seem to be able to buy plastic coat-hangers. You would think, eventually the coat hanger market would become saturated, but apparently not.

The reason South Africans love their cars is obvious; it's extremely difficult to get around without one. Our taxi system is cheap but chaotic and dangerous. Nowhere can you actually hail a cab, an omission that seems incredible for a city the size of Johannesburg. The trains haul millions of South Africans to work every day, but stations are scattered and inconvenient. Travelling long distances in trains is almost comically slow or absurdly expensive. And buses operate infrequently.

If you don't have a car you are condemned to make your way via a massively complex and expensive accumulation of modes of transport, even if you want to travel relatively short distances. The alternative is to fork out a small fortune at high interest rates on a car. The consequence of this poor public transport system is that large numbers of poor and modestly wealthy people are practically forced into the car market. Hence, the ageing pool of motor vehicles has been getting gradually more and more decrepit and the result of that has been a huge number of road deaths.

The declining aggregate quality of the national automotive stock seemed like a creeping crisis. But then amazingly in 2003, everything changed, and the problems have become the exact opposite. For almost a decade until 2003, the car market overall had been pretty stagnant. According to National Association of Automobile Manufacturers of SA (Naamsa) figures, the total domestic sales of new cars and trucks wobbled around 350000 units every year from 1994 to 2003.

But in the past three years, the market has doubled. This doubling of the new car market, echoed in sales of second-hand cars, has led to a new array of problems, none of which seem to be occupying sufficiently the minds of our city administrators or the national government. The first problem is that the road system is in crisis. The slow growth in traffic for such a long time has meant that government has been slow to change its current policy of minimal maintenance and little expansion. In a way it's not surprising that the N2, a national road, has had be closed in places after it was discovered that it is actually slipping into the sea. Traffic jams that were once confined to rush hour are now stretching into longer time periods and becoming almost day-long affairs.

The other problem is the knock-on effect this pent-up demand places on public transport. Since public transport shares resources with private transport, particularly in SA, it too is under strain. Yet improving the public transport constitutes the easiest short-term solution to easing pressure on the roads.

The Gautrain project is the single, major government transport initiative. But its function is more concerned with tourists than with commuters. In short, Joburg urgently needs a substantial underground rail system, to ease the road network and to solidify and concentrate the city's sprawling and haphazard development. This may mean that you will no longer be able to buy your plastic hangers from the comfort of your car on street corners. But given sufficient security, the chances are that at least you will get home in one piece.

In last week's issue, we erroneously attributed the editorial comment to Business Day Political Editor Karima Brown. She did not write the editorial and it is The Weekender's policy not to by-line editorials.