Seventy buses where 221 were planned
Cape Town now plans 70 MyCiTi buses, not 221, after Treasury phases out the Public Transport Network Grant. The real question is what replaces it.
Cape Town now plans to buy 70 buses, not 221, for the MyCiTi expansion into Mitchells Plain and Khayelitsha, and to build seven managed stations instead of 12. #UniteBehind found those numbers in the City's draft transport plan, as GroundUp reported on 16 October. The cause is National Treasury's decision to phase out the Public Transport Network Grant, the national grant that built South Africa's bus rapid transit (BRT) networks, by 2027/28. The money is being moved to passenger rail.
At the national level, Treasury has a point. In February the finance minister said the grant "has not improved access to public transport relative to the investments made," and GroundUp has reported that Pietermaritzburg spent R1 billion of it on a bus system that never ran. But MyCiTi shows the other side. The City reports more than 19 million passenger journeys a year, up 68% since 2021. Its R7.1 billion ten-year allocation ends in June 2028 with R2.2 billion left. That's enough to build Phase 2A, but not enough to buy and run the full fleet.
So the real question is what replaces the grant, not whether to cut one that underperformed. At the 1 October Transport Month launch, Transport Minister Barbara Creecy said her department is reforming its grants into "a unified support model available on selected routes to both bus and taxi operators" (Moneyweb). Cape Town says it doesn't oppose a new Public Transport Fund, but it wants funding tied to performance.
SA Policy Space's Integrated Public Transport Networks page already records the June 2026 wind-down and the underlying problem. BRT trunk lines run alongside subsidised bus contracts, Metrorail and minibus taxis, and taxis carried 80.2% of workers who used public transport in 2020. The grant was worth R7.2 billion in 2025/26, so how its replacement is designed matters a great deal.
Chapter 10 of the textbook names this as a Tier 1, achievable reform: transport subsidy redesign, meaning subsidising "the transport mode poor people actually use, not the one planners wish they used." Winding down the grant is half of that move. The other half is a replacement that pays route by route for service actually delivered, whether by a taxi association or by a BRT that works, like MyCiTi. If the replacement is designed well, the cut becomes the reform. If it isn't, the same Khayelitsha and Mitchells Plain commuters who already lost the Central Line could lose the buses they were promised too.