FROM COVID-19 TO ELECTRIFICATION: HOW MAPPING CAPE TOWN’S POPULAR TRANSIT CHANGED PUBLIC HEALTH
TEAM MEMBERS AND ORGANIZATIONS THAT WQORKED ON MAPPING CAPE TOWN:
JUSTIN COETZEE is the founder and CEO of GoMetro
NIGEL ZEWAKI is a civil engineer and Project Lead at GoMetro
JACQUES PRETORIUS
JOHAN MULLER
RUDI KRIEL
JUSTIN COETZEE is the founder and CEO of GoMetro
NIGEL ZEWAKI is a civil engineer and Project Lead at GoMetro
JACQUES PRETORIUS
JOHAN MULLER
RUDI KRIEL
At first glance, Cape Town’s informal minibus taxis don’t look like instruments of public health policy. They weave and dart through traffic, blaring gospel or house music, their doors barely sliding shut before the next pickup. But when COVID-19 hit, it wasn’t the city’s formal bus or rail networks that held the key to keeping Cape Town moving safely—it was these taxis. More importantly, it was the data about them.
Collected by a grassroots army of mappers, students, and everyday riders, data from Cape Town’s informal transit system became a surprising yet powerful tool. It helped model disease transmission during the pandemic. It underpinned decisions to reopen transport. And today, it’s fueling another transformation: electrifying the minibus fleet to reduce harmful emissions, especially for the women and children who rely on it most.
“We always talk about data in terms of planning or efficiency,” says Nigel Zhuwaki, a civil engineer and one of the project’s leaders. “But here, data became a public health intervention. It helped people breathe.”
THE PULSE BENEATH THE MOUNTAIN
When the morning sun hits Cape Town’s steep hillsides, minibuses begin pouring onto the city’s arterial roads like water through cracked pavement. They honk, swerve, idle, and dart. With handwritten signs on their windshields and a gaatjie, or conductor, hanging halfway out the sliding door calling destinations like “Belleville! Belleville!,” they are as much a part of the urban rhythm as Table Mountain itself––Cape Town’s best-known landmark. But for decades, this entire transit ecosystem operated in a data vacuum—widely used, wildly efficient, and yet officially invisible.
Cape Town’s informal taxi system is vast. Roughly 12,000 minibuses—privately owned, community-run, and hyper-responsive—carry more than 60% of the city’s commuters. “It’s the real people mover,” says Justin Coetzee, founder of GoMetro. “But for a long time, it was invisible to planners, totally missing from official maps.”
Coetzee started GoMetro out of frustration. His train was always late, so maybe he could ride the bus instead. But as he dug deeper into Cape Town’s mobility crisis, he realized the bigger problem wasn’t broken infrastructure. It was missing information about where these buses go.
“The city gave us a list of 800 taxi routes,” he recalls. “But when we hit the streets, we only found 520. The rest were duplicates or outdated. The system didn’t match reality.”
COMMUNITY CARTOGRAPHERS
To bridge that gap, GoMetro built a team—part researchers, part citizens, part community insiders. Many were young people from the townships who already relied on the system every day. Armed with smartphones and training, they became the city’s first “minibus mappers.”
“We created a 100–person data army,” says Coetzee. “They would ride from dawn to dusk, tracking one taxi’s entire journey—how far it went, how many people got on and off, when it idled, where it slept.”
For some, it was their first job. For others, it was a way to formalize the knowledge they already had. “There’s this idea that informality means disorganization,” says Zhuwaki. “But once you’re inside it, you see there’s structure, there’s rhythm. We just needed to record it.”
Zhuwaki has spent more than a decade in South Africa working at the intersection of transit, data, and equity. At GoMetro, he helped lead the technical design of the mapping system while also building trust with the communities whose lives the data would represent.
And the data told a remarkable story: not just where people moved but how long they waited, where they transferred, and who got left behind. It laid bare the spatial injustices of Cape Town’s apartheid legacy and offered a roadmap—literally—for how to fix them.
FROM MAPS TO TRACKING DISEASE
Then came the pandemic.
With streets quieted and fear rampant, GoMetro saw an opportunity to use its data for more than mobility. Partnering with Germany’s Max Planck Institute, the team built a 300,000-agent simulation of Cape Town’s transit network—one of the first agent-based epidemiological models for an African city.
“We wanted to know: is it safe to ride a minibus taxi during COVID?” says Coetzee. The findings were surprising. Unlike offices or shops, where people lingered, minibuses—with their constant air flow and short dwell times—posed a relatively low transmission risk.
“The model showed that you were more likely to catch COVID at work than during the ride there,” he says. That data helped convince national authorities to reopen the taxi sector—an essential step for getting South Africans back to work.
“It was data that protected lives,” says Zhuwaki. “And protected livelihoods.”
Collected by a grassroots army of mappers, students, and everyday riders, data from Cape Town’s informal transit system became a surprising yet powerful tool. It helped model disease transmission during the pandemic. It underpinned decisions to reopen transport. And today, it’s fueling another transformation: electrifying the minibus fleet to reduce harmful emissions, especially for the women and children who rely on it most.
“We always talk about data in terms of planning or efficiency,” says Nigel Zhuwaki, a civil engineer and one of the project’s leaders. “But here, data became a public health intervention. It helped people breathe.”
THE PULSE BENEATH THE MOUNTAIN
When the morning sun hits Cape Town’s steep hillsides, minibuses begin pouring onto the city’s arterial roads like water through cracked pavement. They honk, swerve, idle, and dart. With handwritten signs on their windshields and a gaatjie, or conductor, hanging halfway out the sliding door calling destinations like “Belleville! Belleville!,” they are as much a part of the urban rhythm as Table Mountain itself––Cape Town’s best-known landmark. But for decades, this entire transit ecosystem operated in a data vacuum—widely used, wildly efficient, and yet officially invisible.
Cape Town’s informal taxi system is vast. Roughly 12,000 minibuses—privately owned, community-run, and hyper-responsive—carry more than 60% of the city’s commuters. “It’s the real people mover,” says Justin Coetzee, founder of GoMetro. “But for a long time, it was invisible to planners, totally missing from official maps.”
Coetzee started GoMetro out of frustration. His train was always late, so maybe he could ride the bus instead. But as he dug deeper into Cape Town’s mobility crisis, he realized the bigger problem wasn’t broken infrastructure. It was missing information about where these buses go.
“The city gave us a list of 800 taxi routes,” he recalls. “But when we hit the streets, we only found 520. The rest were duplicates or outdated. The system didn’t match reality.”
COMMUNITY CARTOGRAPHERS
To bridge that gap, GoMetro built a team—part researchers, part citizens, part community insiders. Many were young people from the townships who already relied on the system every day. Armed with smartphones and training, they became the city’s first “minibus mappers.”
“We created a 100–person data army,” says Coetzee. “They would ride from dawn to dusk, tracking one taxi’s entire journey—how far it went, how many people got on and off, when it idled, where it slept.”
For some, it was their first job. For others, it was a way to formalize the knowledge they already had. “There’s this idea that informality means disorganization,” says Zhuwaki. “But once you’re inside it, you see there’s structure, there’s rhythm. We just needed to record it.”
Zhuwaki has spent more than a decade in South Africa working at the intersection of transit, data, and equity. At GoMetro, he helped lead the technical design of the mapping system while also building trust with the communities whose lives the data would represent.
And the data told a remarkable story: not just where people moved but how long they waited, where they transferred, and who got left behind. It laid bare the spatial injustices of Cape Town’s apartheid legacy and offered a roadmap—literally—for how to fix them.
FROM MAPS TO TRACKING DISEASE
Then came the pandemic.
With streets quieted and fear rampant, GoMetro saw an opportunity to use its data for more than mobility. Partnering with Germany’s Max Planck Institute, the team built a 300,000-agent simulation of Cape Town’s transit network—one of the first agent-based epidemiological models for an African city.
“We wanted to know: is it safe to ride a minibus taxi during COVID?” says Coetzee. The findings were surprising. Unlike offices or shops, where people lingered, minibuses—with their constant air flow and short dwell times—posed a relatively low transmission risk.
“The model showed that you were more likely to catch COVID at work than during the ride there,” he says. That data helped convince national authorities to reopen the taxi sector—an essential step for getting South Africans back to work.
“It was data that protected lives,” says Zhuwaki. “And protected livelihoods.”
CLEAN AIR, REAL IMPACT
With the health argument made once, GoMetro took it a step further. What if data could help fight another urban epidemic: air pollution?
Diesel-powered taxis are a major source of NOx and PM2.5 emissions, especially in dense, lower-income neighborhoods where vehicles idle for long stretches. “These fumes go straight into the lungs of women and children,” explains Coetzee. “Electrification isn’t just about carbon. It’s about clean air—right now, where people live.”
Using its deep dataset, GoMetro modeled charging needs, route distances, and driver behavior. It found that most taxis only travel about 40 kilometers per leg, which is well within the range of modern electric vehicles. With this evidence, Cape Town is now piloting one of Africa’s first electric minibus programs, involving 40 vehicles and 15 taxi associations.
“Our data showed electrification was not just feasible—it was necessary,” says Zhuwaki. “It’s cheaper, cleaner, and more reliable.”
DIGNITY THROUGH DATA
What’s most powerful about Cape Town’s story isn’t just the tech or the numbers. It’s the way the project gave dignity to a system long dismissed.
When GoMetro printed its first route maps—simple paper fold outs with stops and prices—drivers started taping them to their windows. “It was a symbol of pride,” Coetzee says. “They finally saw their work reflected in something official.”
Operators began using the data to optimize routes. Riders began trusting that a taxi would come on time. For many, the shift was as emotional as it was functional: “People said, ‘Now I can be confident. Now I can breathe,’” Zhuwaki recalls.
And that, perhaps, is the real legacy of the project: showing that data, when gathered with care and shared with respect, can do more than just improve service. It can protect health. It can empower workers. It can give voice to systems long ignored.
“We always say,” Coetzee reflects, “mapping is just the beginning.
With the health argument made once, GoMetro took it a step further. What if data could help fight another urban epidemic: air pollution?
Diesel-powered taxis are a major source of NOx and PM2.5 emissions, especially in dense, lower-income neighborhoods where vehicles idle for long stretches. “These fumes go straight into the lungs of women and children,” explains Coetzee. “Electrification isn’t just about carbon. It’s about clean air—right now, where people live.”
Using its deep dataset, GoMetro modeled charging needs, route distances, and driver behavior. It found that most taxis only travel about 40 kilometers per leg, which is well within the range of modern electric vehicles. With this evidence, Cape Town is now piloting one of Africa’s first electric minibus programs, involving 40 vehicles and 15 taxi associations.
“Our data showed electrification was not just feasible—it was necessary,” says Zhuwaki. “It’s cheaper, cleaner, and more reliable.”
DIGNITY THROUGH DATA
What’s most powerful about Cape Town’s story isn’t just the tech or the numbers. It’s the way the project gave dignity to a system long dismissed.
When GoMetro printed its first route maps—simple paper fold outs with stops and prices—drivers started taping them to their windows. “It was a symbol of pride,” Coetzee says. “They finally saw their work reflected in something official.”
Operators began using the data to optimize routes. Riders began trusting that a taxi would come on time. For many, the shift was as emotional as it was functional: “People said, ‘Now I can be confident. Now I can breathe,’” Zhuwaki recalls.
And that, perhaps, is the real legacy of the project: showing that data, when gathered with care and shared with respect, can do more than just improve service. It can protect health. It can empower workers. It can give voice to systems long ignored.
“We always say,” Coetzee reflects, “mapping is just the beginning.