ANA reports that Cape Town’s Brett Herron said on Wednesday that the latest statistics on vandalism of the city’s MyCiTi and Golden Arrow bus services and of the Passenger Rail Agency of SA (Prasa) Metrorail service indicated that public transport faced an onslaught.  

Bus stations at Dunoon and Usasaza were damaged at the weekend when protesters attacked the infrastructure with bricks, stones, and burning tyres.  Herron, a member of the mayoral committee for transport and urban development, highlighted the following:  six Golden Arrow buses were set alight between March 2016 and September 2017 at a cost of over R12 million; a further R529,000 was spent on replacing shattered bus windows; the cost of damage to MyCiTi stations due to vandalism and protest action from July 2014 to September 2017 amounted to nearly R4 million; Metrorail reported 668 incidents of vandalism and other attacks on its rolling stock in the Western Cape in the 2016/17 financial year; and the cost to repair vandalised traffic signals across Cape Town, as well as the cost of replacing stolen road infrastructure was about R6,6 million for the period from July 2015 to September 2017.  Herron warned that vandalism could collapse the public transport system.

• Read this report in full at The Citizen

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