Specialised Skills

Our experienced team can help you streamline or design your public transport systems, whether for a large city, an industrial hub, a small town and everything in between. Having worked in large cities, small towns, and urban and peri-urban hubs, we have the skills required to deliver the following solutions:

Active Mobility and Non-Motorised Transport

Non-Motorised Transport (NMT) refers to modes of transport like walking and cycling. These modes of transport form part of every journey, with walking dominating in the South African context.

Thoir 76 has extensive experience in pedestrian design and modelling that supports sustainability for transport planning and traffic engineering. This includes:

Designing PT networks and support networks

Urban design solutions and local trip mobility

Creating car-free travel and affordable travel solutions

Setting up cycling academies for children learning to ride

Active Mobility talks about creating an environment that is conducive to safe, efficient NMT, and promoting the most sustainable and affordable forms of travel. It looks at creating public spaces and transport infrastructure and facilities that enable citizens to cycle or walk.

To do this, we must understand the behaviours and needs of the people in an area, their travel movement and patterns, desire lines and accessible routes, and what they need from an NMT system. This allows us to design the right infrastructure in the right place in a way that promotes maximum usage AND forms part of the public transport which in turn supports the sustainability of the entire system.

Sustainability

Sustainability is an umbrella term with vastly different meanings based on the goals of a project, programme, business, organisation or government department. We look to understand what sustainability means for our clients in the context of their projects and work towards quantifying its value in terms of project delivery and ongoing operation. We do this by looking at Business Innovation and Integrated Urban Solutions.

Business Innovation

We understand that any project, development or indeed a node or city is a business and should be run as one. The bottom line has different meanings for different sectors and we view success as a function of what is important to the business and its KPIs. Part of this success is also understanding that businesses evolve and their approach to doing business has to follow suit.
To this end, we create, define and unpack each value proposition, ensuring that we understand the value of the business and how to position it for maximum opportunity.

Integrated Urban Solutions

Integrated Urban Solutions (IUS) are based primarily on the packaging of a solution that has land use, transportation, people and place, and economics in balance. The right IUS looks at improving lifestyle and ultimately reducing costs. It draws together the key revenue generators and collective cost savings creating a socio-economic surplus and enhancing sustainability.|For us, creating the right IUS means focusing on all the components of urban development and sustainability and ensuring they leverage one another to maximise the value of the project and the place.Our goal is to ensure that each package component or solution we create supports the values of an IUS sustainability model.

Transport Planning

We adopt a holistic approach to transport planning and engineering, one that looks to create integrated urban solutions that go beyond the transport element of a project.

While we are always careful to follow the legislated principles of transport planning, we are equally dedicated to designing the best solution for the system’s current and forecasted demands.

An imperative design element is always financial savings in all forms and we are proud to report that our efficient transport system designs have already meant substantial financial savings in operational and vehicle CAPEX. for our clients.

We have successfully undertaken projects for various Metros, District Municipalities and Local Municipalities in South Africa, which included designing public transport systems for millions of people in a way that ensures transport modes complement, rather than compete with one another.

Public Transport

Public Transport (PT) planning serves to connect places using the best route location, the most appropriate mode and related headways to service the demand.

Whilst PT planning is a very technical and intricate design process it has to be driven by an understanding of the movement patterns in an area and how a system can positively support and better these patterns. In this way, PT systems are not sustainable in their singular form but rather in their regenerative impact on urban environments, in so far as enabling densification which in turn triggers nodal sustainability, an increased rates base, reduction in trip length distribution and the increase in related industries and secondary businesses.

Our team has designed PT systems for eThekwini, Msunduzi, the City of Johannesburg and other nodes that have formed the basis of operational plans, business plans and infrastructure design.

Public Transport Infrastructure Design

Infrastructure design plays a fundamental role in traffic engineering. We have delivered various public transport designs including several intermodal interchanges; ranking/holding facilities as well as concepts for public transport depots. We have also completed geometric designs for several public transport corridors at the road layout level, including for a transit mall.

Thoir 76 director, Rocky Herrmann wrote and presented a paper on pedestrian modelling for Bridge City at SATC and at the PTV conference in India.

Public Transport Contracts and Contract Operational Data

We have extensive experience in preparing public transport operational contracts, with support from local legal teams.

Having been the team leader for a major city-wide public transport system, director Rocky Herrmann has extensive experience in operational planning. This includes detailed operational sheets for each route; fleet and route descriptions; origin and destination information; passenger kilometres; operational kilometres; route transit profiles and bandwidth plots.

Public Transport Operational Implementation

We are proud to have pioneered a system for a mini-bus taxi incentive programme for one of SA’s major cities. The creation and implementation of this programme included road shows in all the surrounding provincial regions, engaging with and achieving buy-in from numerous taxi operators.

Fare Strategies

Revenue has long been the Achilles heel of the public transport system.
The overall fare compendium is made up of Fare Strategy Framework, Fare Policy, Fare Structure, Fare Levels and Fare Rules. We believe affordability is key, and that the fare structure and levels should ensure that the maximum fare recovery is achieved.

With our experience, we have created a process where clients can test multiple fare structures and levels to help determine the one that best aligns with the local environment. This is validated against a baseline of fare information for a typical month. These tools have been developed based on data from a live project, enhancing the authenticity of the process.

Infrastructure Implementation

We are experienced in a large city transport infrastructure implementation programme with numerous projects with varying goals running at different stages.

A key to the success of this programme was setting up the systems, processes and procedures to ensure that each project could be managed from both a contractual and programme management perspective. This was done by implementing systems that allow for project management to be conducted by an institution and not by individuals. By placing accountability in the correct areas, black economic transformation was tracked, and all audit compliances were met.

A major part of the infrastructure management was monitoring the interaction between city management, consultants and contractors. The goal was zero claims and the delivery of the projects on time and under budget OR with forewarning of things that may go wrong.

Traffic Engineering

We have extensive experience in running traffic engineering projects, putting our traffic analysis skills to good use and employing static and microsimulation methods.

We have undertaken the traffic engineering for two presidential priority projects in RSA, with a collective bulk of over 3 million square metres and a peak-hour person trip generation of more than 110 000 trips. The transportation network work designs were for both public and private transport.

We have successfully designed complex interchanges with extreme constraints. For an industrial area expansion programme, we lead the microsimulation analysis for the proposed facility upgrade. This included a multi-modal analysis of varying trucks and private vehicles.

In addition, detailed traffic engineering was undertaken for both the Durban Harbour and Richards Bay port expansion projects which included complex modelling of freight and logistics operations integrated with normal traffic operations.