Metrorail: Trains are safer
2003-05-21 19:34
Cape Town - Although the cost of damage caused by vandals and arsonists to Metrorail assets had increased in the financial year which ended in March, serious crime had decreased, Metrorail's CEO Honey Mateya said on Wednesday.
He told the media aboard a Metrorail train at Claremont station in Cape Town that vandalism had cost the company R11.3m nationally in the financial year which ended in March, compared to R8.7m for the previous financial year.
He also said that serious crime-related incidents since October 2002 to April 2003 had decreased by 63% compared to the previous corresponding period.
Police were unable to confirm the decrease in crime on trains.
"The security and safety of our commuters is of major concern to Metrorail but since the upheaval of the 1980s, when all auxiliary police were integrated in the SA Police Service, a vacuum had been left in the rail system," Mayteya said.
"Our guards do not have arresting powers.
"We are talking to police and they are assisting us to make sure we can deal with criminal elements," Mateya said, adding the company could deal with petty crime.
The company would meet police on Thursday to focus on more serious crimes, such as murder and robbery and ways to prevent this.
Although security on trains had been increased over the past year, these measures were still not enough.
"Commuters still have a sense of not being looked after," Mateya said.
Mateya said railway police were "also coming into the equation" to safeguard commuters.
Mateya said 10 000 railway carriage windows had been lost in the Western Cape during the past three years but many windows had since been replaced with transparent polycarbonate windows with no commercial value.
Fourteen coaches had been tested to date and none of the polycarbonate-type windows had been reported stolen.
A spokesperson for the Rail Commuter Action Group Leslie van Minnen, whose son was stabbed to death at Fish Hoek station two years ago, described Wednesday's exercise as "window dressing".
"Go and ask the person who gets on a train at 19:00 who has to go home on a Friday with R300 in his pocket - his earnings for the week, and he has a gun stuck in his back and his money taken or a woman raped on a train," Van Minnen said.
"Go and ask them about security on trains.
"There's no management, there's no control and no decent security," Van Minnen said.
He said a public relations exercise like Wednesday's was wonderful but "tomorrow and Friday you'll get another statistic in the newspaper - some other person who is robbed or raped or murdered on the train".
The Rail Commuter Action Group was formed in Fish Hoek by people who had suffered from crime on trains.
- SAPA