Botswana is planning a bigger, modern bus rank for Gaborone — underground, spacious, and expensive. But beneath the concrete lies a deeper failure: the absence of a public transport policy. Without a clear vision for how people should move, the country risks pouring money into infrastructure that locks in inefficiency instead of fixing it.
Public transport in Botswana has reached a peculiar moment. It is simultaneously absent from national policy and dominant in daily reality. Despite moving the majority of urban passengers every day, public transport is missing from party manifestos, from NDP12, and from the Botswana Integrated Transport Plan.
Yet in recent weeks it has dominated headlines: fare increases, strike threats by bus and combi operators, and proposals for a “new modern bus rank” in Gaborone. This contradiction exposes the core problem. Botswana does not lack buses, combis, or ranks.
Read Full Article on The Gazette
[paywall]
It lacks a coherent public transport policy. The proposed solution — a larger, more spacious bus rank — is conceptually outdated. It assumes that public transport requires more land, more parking, more layover, and more congestion.
In reality, modern public transport systems require less space, not more. In contemporary transport planning, a city-centre bus interchange is not a parking lot. It is a flow-through node.
Vehicles arrive, load passengers, and depart according to fixed timetables published digitally and enforced operationally. Layover, refuelling, charging, cleaning, and overnight parking take place off-site, outside the interchange. Gaborone’s current bus rank fails precisely because it functions as a bus storage yard rather than a transport interchange.
Buses occupy scarce urban land for hours — sometimes days — consuming space that should serve passengers, pedestrians, commerce, and urban regeneration. Expanding this model merely locks in inefficiency. The existing bus rank and its surroundings represent one of Gaborone’s most significant missed development opportunities.
Internationally, cities have transformed central transport nodes into high-value mixed-use precincts, integrating retail, offices, housing, public space, and seamless multimodal connectivity. Instead, Botswana continues to dedicate prime urban land to low-productivity vehicle parking. This is not just a planning error; it is an economic one.
Urban land is capital. When it is misallocated, growth is suppressed. A modern bus interchange should therefore be smaller, denser, and embedded within a broader urban redevelopment strategy — not expanded outward as a standalone project.
Behind the infrastructure debate lies a deeper structural issue. Botswana’s public transport industry is atomised and informal, yet expected to deliver a quasi-public service. Thousands of individually owned buses and combis operate under weak licensing conditions, minimal coordination, inconsistent standards, and no meaningful self-regulation.
Price disputes and strike threats are therefore not anomalies. They are the predictable outcome of a system with no institutional spine. Public transport is a classic network industry, characterised by scale economies, coordination benefits, and strong public-interest externalities.
Treating it as a loose collection of independent operators guarantees inefficiency, volatility, and conflict. The solution is not heavier regulation for its own sake, but industry restructuring and rationalisation. This includes quality-based licensing, where operating rights are conditional on vehicle standards, safety, emissions, and service reliability.
It also requires consolidation into route-based operating companies or cooperatives that enable economies of scale, professional management, and collective bargaining. Operators must be repositioned as service providers rather than fare-chasers. Predictable contracts, clear routes, published timetables, and performance monitoring replace fare hikes as the mechanism for financial sustainability.
Without this shift, infrastructure investment alone will deliver little more than cosmetic change. Public transport is Botswana’s fastest route to transport decarbonisation, yet this potential is entirely absent from current planning. Electrifying buses and high-utilisation combis lowers operating costs per kilometre, reduces exposure to fuel price shocks, improves urban air quality, and cuts foreign-exchange leakage from fuel imports.
[/paywall]
