The City of Cape Town’s specialised health service is concerned about the impact of the ongoing rail network woes on Cape Town’s ambient air quality.

In a statement on Thursday (19 October), the service said that motor vehicle emissions are the biggest contributor to air pollution in the city, and the failing rail service is exacerbating the problem.

“A number of air quality monitoring stations have recorded increased levels of nitrogen oxide (NOx), which supports the contention that vehicle emissions are on the rise,” said the city’s mayoral committee member, Alderman JP Smith.

Smith noted that while Cape Town’s air quality complies with the annual average ambient air quality standards, periodic episode days do occur where the daily ambient standards have been exceeded.

“In the last financial year, 13 episode days were recorded,” he said.

“The pollutant that most frequently exceeds the standards is particulate matter (PM10), with occasional episodes where ground-level ozone exceeds allowable limits.”

Smith added that the severe drought experienced over the last three years has also contributed to these PM10 episodes, leading to an increase in windblown dust and also exacerbating the incidence of veld fires.

Detection hardware

Cape Town currently has a range of monitoring and evaluation systems and processes to detect and act on air pollution.

This includes an air quality monitoring network that is managed by the Scientific Services Air Quality Laboratories.

The network consists of 40 analysers at 14 ambient air quality monitoring stations located across the city. Currently, a process is under way to replace ageing analysers, with City Health providing R3.7 million towards the replacement cost over a three-year period.

The City has also installed a high-powered camera monitoring network on the antennae located on Tygerberg Hills. The Air Quality Management Unit has access to live feeds from this network which allows for remote monitoring of dark smoke emissions, it said.

“By and large, industries are generally compliant,” said Smith

“However, administrative enforcement actions are embarked upon where industries fail to ensure full compliance with licence conditions.

The aim of these actions is first and foremost to ensure environmental protection; and secondly, they bring non-complying industries back into compliance.

With a maximum fine of R5 million for a first offence prescribed by legislation, and the fact that company directors can be held personally accountable, we find that this is a big enough deterrent to ensure good levels of compliance,” he said.

Traffic

While Cape Town’s traffic has been exacerbated by ongoing rail network issues in recent months, the city has routinely been named as the most congested in South Africa.

A March PwC report, citing Tom Tom’s Traffic Index (which uses live vehicle speeds from SatNav devices), shows congestion in Cape Town to be around 35%.

This means that it is worse than many smaller cities but better off than most of the major cities covered by the study, PwC said.

“However, public sentiment paints a different picture. Using Google trends data, which tracks the popularity of a search term over time, it is possible to show how concerned residents are about one issue relative to all others,” PwC said.

“Over the course of a year, Cape Town’s searches are significantly higher than the other three cities,” it said.

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