Cape Town - An unexpected power outage along the Southern Line disappointingly brought an abrupt end to an experimental train trip for about 30 special needs children from Bel Porto School on Monday.
The Lansdowne-based schoolchildren with severe intellectual and physical disabilities, such as Down syndrome and cerebral palsy, were accompanied by their teachers and given goodie bags in Prasa’s Premier Lounge before departure.
The data-gathering exercise to test user experiences for people with disabilities on Prasa’s Electric Multiple Unit (EMU), or the Blue Trains, was put together by Lorenzo Davids of the Justice Fund in partnership with Prasa.
Excitement mounted with the children taking in views of the city and being kept entertained with song and dance.
Ten minutes after the train departed from Cape Town station en route to Fish Hoek, the intercom on board announced the unexpected interruption, believed to be an unscheduled load shedding which resulted in the children prematurely heading back to the Cape Town station.
Bel Porto deputy principal Hanri van Jaarsveld said that for many of the children, it was a first-time experience.
“For our physically disabled children, access to public transport is a massive issue. We’re not near the accessibility that we want for our children: safe, reliable transport for them.
“A lot of our physically disabled children coming from areas like Khayelitsha and Gugulethu struggle to find reliable transport. It’s a long road ahead to get to a point where public transport is accessible for our children.”
Provincial Metrorail acting spokesperson Zinobulali Mihi said the region received 20 EMUs, with seven in use. The trains are being introduced in a phased manner.
“We’re trying to promote the service on board these trains so that everybody can become accustomed to knowing what the train features are all about.
“Also, we’re trying to create a dialogue, get people to talk to us about how we can improve our services because currently we are busy with service improvements as part of promoting the new service,” Mihi said.
Services were not supposed to be affected by load shedding up until Stage 4.
Davids, who advocates for the use of public transport, said he had been engaging with the public transport sector, in particular trains and taxis over the past year, to encourage people to use public transport.
“I know that post-pandemic, many people were discouraged and quite frankly disheartened and disgusted by what had happened to Prasa, the destruction of the stations, the bad service, just the dereliction of the entire asset became quite nauseating to the public and I think people lost complete confidence in it.
“In addition to that was the absolute sense that you were unsafe within the Prasa infrastructure. So we are here as part of a series of activations to tell people it is safe, it is on time, it is reliable and it is clean and it is available to everyone.”
Davids said the information gathered from the trip would be used to influence scheduling, safety features and physical infrastructure of trains and platforms for an improved commuter experience.