The organisation notes that while this month’s focus is usually on vehicles, freight and road safety, there is a complex municipal engineering ecosystem behind every functioning urban transport network. Municipal engineers design, build and maintain the infrastructure that determines how smoothly cities move and how urban economies grow.

They design and maintain roads; ensure that traffic flow is optimised, with intersections that perform efficiently; and they provide for pedestrians’ mobility and access. They must understand where congestion develops and consider how new development will place pressure on existing networks. With sustainability and climate resilience increasingly topping the agenda, municipal engineers are balancing rapid urbanisation with environmental impact, planning and designing for extreme weather events and flooding, to protect roads and transit systems.

Municipal engineers are also responsible for how people move between different modes of transport. The City of Cape Town provides an example of this in the new MyCiTi station that is taking shape in Claremont. This project forms part of the MyCiTi bus service expansion that will connect Mitchells Plain and Khayelitsha with Claremont and Wynberg. It includes green technologies to improve resource efficiency and reduce environmental impacts.

The new station is within walking distance from the Claremont railway station and the minibus-taxi facility in Ralph Street. Once complete, the new bus terminus will accommodate not only the MyCiTi bus service, but also Golden Arrow Bus Service (GABS) and the University of Cape Town (UCT) shuttle service for students.

This site is located on very high-value land. For this reason, the station was designed so that it can grow upwards – allowing for up to about ten storeys of mixed-use development to boost the vibrancy and efficiency of this public transport precinct. The City of Cape Town notes that applying the principles of transit-oriented development will foster future investment and ensure that this prime real estate is not sterilised.

The precinct is expected to become one of Cape Town’s most connected and integrated transport hubs, offering commuters access to five different public transport options: MyCiTi, Golden Arrow, the UCT Shuttle, rail and minibus-taxis, all within a 120-metre footprint. Transferring between different public transport modes will be easy and efficient, whether heading to the metro south-east along the MyCiTi trunk route or on to Cape Town by train, taxi or bus. This is the result of deliberate, integrated planning by the City’s municipal engineers.

IMESA says that municipal engineers sit at a critically important intersection between technical expertise, public service and economic development. Their decisions affect the road outside a factory, the intersection outside a shopping centre, the bus lane used by thousands of commuters, the drainage system protecting a business district and the conditions attached to a new development. They have to reconcile competing demands for limited space and resources while designing for safety, accessibility, resilience and future growth.

That is why South Africa needs to keep growing, developing, empowering and supporting the municipal engineering profession, IMESA states. “As South Africa grapples with failing infrastructure and growing service delivery challenges, it is vital that we build the technical capacity of skills-constrained municipalities.”

COGTA regulations stipulate a ratio of three technical service delivery staff members (engineers, planners, artisans, etc) for every one support staff member (HR, Finance, SCM, audit etc). IMESA asserts that there is not a single municipality in the country that meets this requirement. Some of the better run municipalities sit at a one-to-one ratio at present. Rectifying this imbalance and working towards the COGTA defined ratio will help turn the tide in service delivery.

The organisation also notes that many ongoing failures in transport and public infrastructure are because engineers are excluded from procurement and planning decisions and calls for this to change across South African municipalities.

Behind a city that moves is an engineering profession that makes movement possible, is IMESA’s message this Transport Month.