Civil Engineering September 2021 | Vol 29 No 8

Civil Engineering September 2021 23 building of the first railways in England and America. It is in South Africa, mainly before 1994, where such interference has gone beyond the normal political dimension and strongly embraced ideological objectives of minority groups of whatever ilk. This has resulted in lost opportunities to bring about an effective and efficient system in many facets of transport, land and energy use with seriously deleterious effects for the majority of people. During the second part of the period mentioned, there was a major loss of institutional memory and capacity in public sector bodies who should be managing the system, as well as possibly benign indifference by the political hierarchy; the consequences of which is that the situation has worsened. Thus, during the past decades there have been many lost opportunities to create an effective system for these aspects of transport. However, with sufficient will and dedication, a restor- ative approach to some of these lost opportunities can be arrived at and, in line with world trends, transport policymakers in South Africa now will have to adapt to a changing economic and regula- tory philosophy and milieu. Regulatory philosophy has successively changed over time from an unregulated environment early in the twentieth century, to a highly regulated and protectionist approach, then to an era of liberalisation and deregulation, followed by a re-definition of the role of government and institutional re-alignment in transport affairs, and then to the latest phase of transport policy reform and strategic intervention. Also, for example, the social need for the provision of affordable basic goods and access to dispersed communities does not always coincide with the provision of an effective and affordable logistics as well a public transport facility or network. Thus, supporting all the goals of the current government’s broader policies such as sustainable economic growth, economic transformation, meeting basic needs, and human resource devel- opment, while at the same time promoting global competitive- ness, all in a constrained financial and competence environment, requires great ingenuity from transport policymakers. FREIGHT LOGISTICS In addition to the above-mentioned factors, the handling of freight together with associated logistic systems embraces the added complexity of responding to technological changes and market preferences involved in moving goods in an optimum manner. At the start of the 20 th century there was no competition to moving goods by rail and sea through clearly identified ports. Both exports and imports followed the fundamentals of ‘pushing through’ logistic practices and stockpiling at easily identifiable points along the supply chain. However, World War II led to technological developments in the field of freight transport logis- tics which has become a sophisticated science. This is the result of both the experience of, particularly, the United States armed services, as well as from clients embracing ‘just in time’ and ‘pull through’ logistic and delivery systems. This introduced a survival threat for rail. A peculiarity of rail as it has been historically administered is that all costs of infrastructure, operations and control are borne internally. While economies were growing robustly it was relatively easy to fund rail (and its inevitably growing financial deficits) through bond issues, generally guaranteed by governments. Road transport on the other hand has vehicles costed and paid for by vehicle owners, roads generally provided by the public purse in one form or another, and control systems provided by the public purse generally at local level. Thus, despite efforts made by rail operators in improving efficiency, the systems which existed just could not compete financially with road. The response by societies was to continually increase the subsidy put into public rail transport. A similar debate of state monopoly versus smaller diversified suppliers is currently underway in the energy field. What tended to be overlooked in this transport and logistics process, which ran for a period of some 30 years from the end of World War II until the 1970s, was that rail’s inherent techno- logical logistical advantage over road lay in moving large volumes of low value commodities and valuable freight in containers over long distances in excess of 1 000 km. When this realisation began in the 1970s, the response was to either split networks into opera- tions (trains), infrastructure (rail) and control, as occurred in the United Kingdom, or to retain single source financing but over long distances, as was done in North America. Southern African countries appeared conflicted in the choice of model as the countries, with their inherently smaller econo- mies when compared to Europe, could not break rail systems into the three functions as was done in the UK. They also did not wish to follow the North American model of long routes, due to the innate political differences between the countries. Inevitably road won and freight forwarders moved to road influenced by price, speed, and security. The demise of rail hence continues irrespec- tive of idealised policy statements in support of the rail mode. An additional problem facing rail in South Africa is the current physical theft of rail infrastructure. How do we overcome this apparent death spiral of rail? The first is to recognise the fundamental technological benefits of rail over road. These are the movement of low-value, high-bulk com- modities; the movement of containers over long land distances of more than 1 000 km unfettered by border controls; and the move- ment of people at high speed in the urban environment. The need for public-private partnerships in regional rail and port administration in Southern Africa thus becomes self-evident as governments, often lacking the necessary expertise, cannot unwind the necessary rail logistic programmes unaided; and the private sector cannot operate across borders unaided by govern- ments who specify border crossing rules. Comparison of private versus public operated ports is readily evident from the metrics of Maputo versus Durban and Richards Bay as well as, for example, Port Hedland in Australia together with others, particularly in Brazil. The harmonised and integrated movement of freight, as envisaged in the National Logistics Freight Strategy, can only be realised if all modes are used to their best technological advan- tages. This means effective and unbiased economic regulation conducted by a politically impartial and independent National Department of Transport, economic regulation, as well as physical regulation, in the interests of public safety. In parallel with that, South Africa must permit its rural eco- nomic form to re-align with patterns long identified by geogra- phers to overcome the forced boundaries established by previous governments on ideological grounds.