The Public Transport Operations Grant is a national government conditional grant to subsidise the costs of specified forms of commuter transport in South Africa’s major cities.
In the Western Cape, the Department of Transport and Public Works pays the grant to Golden Arrow Bus Services to reduce the operating costs of providing bus commuter services in the City of Cape Town metropolitan area. Every year, 37,4 million commuter-trip kilometres are subsidised, which equates to 1,4 million trips on 2 500 routes.
In accordance with the grant conditions, our Performance Monitoring and Evaluation unit collaborated with the Cape Higher Education Consortium to conduct an evaluation of the service from a commuter point of view. This included capturing commuters’ positive stories of change on film.
Impact Assessment of the Public Transport Operations Conditional Grant (PTOG) 2016/17
The purpose of the Impact Assessment of the Public Transport Operations Conditional Grant (PTOG) 2016/17 evaluation report is to enable the Western Cape Department of Transport and Public Works (DTPW) to assess the effectiveness of the grant expenditure in the Western Cape in order to provide information that will assist management to be made more effective through:
- Improving bus service characteristics that customers value,
- Improving bus operational efficiency, and
- Documenting customers’ experience in respect of the bus services implemented in the financial year.
The report also aims to strengthen future PTOG evaluation processes by providing data to inform the development or review of an appropriate surveying approach to the evaluation of the management of the conditional grant to:
- Measure and understand trends in population behaviour, and
- Collect timely information on emerging travel issues.
Read the full evaluation report