Anyone that was in Africa knows them: the taxi minibuses which provide cheap transportation for locals (and few tourists). In Cape Town, South Africa there are about 150,000 taxi buses. They count for 60% of the common transport. Taxi vans are not equipped with taxi meters and they all follow a more or less fixed route – usually between one central location and a township or corporate quarter.
Hopping on and off is standard procedure. To lure passengers, drivers constantly use their horn. This non-stop noise from 05h in the morning though, is working on the nerves of those who live on such a route or those who rent a Cape Town accommodation for their holiday. The permanent residents and seasonal tourists at Camps Bay, a seaside resort near Cape Town, have been complaining for years at the Mother City’s council. The city council has negotiated unsuccessfully for months with the taxi associations to ask the taxi drivers to honk less. As a result, Cape Town city banned hooting along the busy Main Road. The Cape newspaper ‘Die Burger’ writes that law will be enforced: hooting taxi drives should be aware that they will be fined for hooting in the future.
The penalty for unnecessary honking in Camps Bay, Cape Town is 300 Rand (about 27 euros), and the city council of Cape Town threatens to extend the ban to other parts of Cape Town if the taxi drivers do not moderate hooting.
On September 1st, Johannesburg was quiet as taxi drives were on strike, honking very little. They went on strike against the introduction of the Reya Vaya Bus Rapid Transit (BRT), the first South African fast bus service. In South Africa buses have only 20% market share of common transport, and the South African government wants to improve to a modern and well structured BRT network. Following the introduction of the bus, taxi drivers even used arms response to express their condemnation.
