Here is the thing that the article overlooks. According to TomTom's statistics Cape Town is now the most congested city in Africa, and in the top-5 worldwide. It was not like this just two years ago. In two years it went from relatively free-flowing traffic with only occasional jams in fairly predictable places that locals could easily avoid (at least, outside of tourist season) to one of the most congested cities in the world - where people now routinely need to budget 90 minutes or more to get from a home in Bellville to a job in town (not a very long distance). You can't avoid it with backroads either - they are jammed too.

What changed ? The trains stopped running reliably. We can debate why but the core of it remains: when the trains worked reasonably well, many people (including lots of white-collar workers) used them to get to work. Now all those people are using taxis or cars - and the roads simply cannot handle the extra load. We need MPT to make cars feasible.