It’s a workday morning and Park Station in Johannesburg is bustling with activity. People carrying different sizes of luggage are rushing around, trying to find their bus so they can head to some other part of the country. I am one of those people.
The sales manager comes over to explain that our bus is on the way. A man standing next to me, with a downcast face, says Autopax has problems. The bus company is a subsidiary of the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa . It operates Translux — a luxury, long-distance inter-city service — and City to City regional services to various destinations in South Africa and Mozambique.
The man standing next to me shares some of this information, venting about the company that has now delayed his journey. But he doesn’t want to spend long hours driving alone in his car, especially after he almost had an accident when he nearly fell asleep at the wheel. “You have a state-owned entity, where the government sees a role for it in the long-distance passenger road transport market, but it has to compete with the private sector companies, that are just more effective and efficient,” he says. quoted as saying
Despite broken buses and poor maintenance, the committee said the company still operates a service schedule that assumes that 100% of its 570 buses are working. And, to make matters worse, the company has not been receiving money from its parent company Prasa, although this is an issue Prasa says it is working to address.
Walters says the private sector has a profit motive: if businesses do not make money, they go under. There is no cross-funding for the private sector, which Autopax can get from Prasa.