Bernice Moore

This article was initially published in The Conversation: Overlooking one of the busiest intersections in the central City of Cape Town, en route to one of its biggest tourist attractions, the Waterfront, are two road stubs hanging high above the ground. They form part of the city’s unfinished Foreshore freeways. Follow the arc that the […]

To put the real children – with their lived experiences and their playful ways of being in the world – at the front of discussions about road safety is going to take a move away from traditional ways of doing engineering.  When we do the accounting of safety in ways other than counting in numbers,

When the latest iteration of Cape Town’s Foreshore Precinct scheme was launched with great fanfare it looked like the so -called ‘unfinished’ freeways would get resolved. The Mayor and her staff seemed fully behind the scheme and the idea of inviting in the creativity of the private sector had much promise. It seemed that lessons

It happened again this week. A colleague expressing disbelief at the lack of discussion in transport planning in South Africa about social justice issues. “Isn’t it obvious,” they said, “that in a country like South Africa the needs of the person on foot must be put first?”   I find myself, again, explaining how transport

The counterpoint to a love for the freedom of the road is a distaste, even revulsion, for anything ‘congested’. History give us some hints about our shared social distaste for congestion and our yearning to be released from it.   The Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918, described as “one of the most traumatic events in

The only reason I am not completely intimidated by transport economists is because I have been inside the belly of the beast. My first job was as a transport modeller, the people who feed information to transport economists. Then I worked doing cost-benefit analyses, the bread and butter of a transport economist’s work. I tell

We sat in a formal board-room table overlooking central Cape Town just before Christmas of 2012. We were a small, enthusiastic bunch of street geeks (some of whom went on to set up Open Streets Cape Town) listening intently as each took turns to answer the question: “so, what do you want?” I scribbled a

Funders and corporates are accountable to shareholders and voters. Why should anyone, or any thing, offer funds for something which cannot be measured? Especially in a South African context where the needs are so many and the resources so limited?   Into this mix…conversations about what is necessary in this country? Will “development”, either economic

When an exasperated Professor of Transport Policy, Phil Goodwin took to the stage for his inaugural lecture at the University College London, with a lecture memorably titled, Solving Congestion (when we must not build roads, increase spending, lose votes, damage the economy, and will never find equilibrium), he took a well-aimed swipe at the ignorance

It’s over fifty years since construction on the ‘unfinished’ foreshore freeways in Cape Town started. For most of the 1940s and 1950s the foreshore beyond Adderley Street was a windswept, bleak sandy wasteland. It had been reclaimed from the sea for the construction of a new port during the 1930s, but by the early 1960s,