Mogale City has published a draft precinct plan for the Muldersdrift-Lanseria area, setting out what needs to exist before Lanseria Smart City can be built.

The document says telecommunications, broadband and smart infrastructure are to be treated as essential urban infrastructure rather than a secondary private-sector add-on, calls for a shared digital backbone with common ducting, fibre reticulation and 5G enablement, and confirms a Smart City Station east of Lanseria Airport as part of the proposed Gautrain Phase 5 expansion.

Journalists visiting the site repeatedly since 2020, however, report the only physical progress is an incomplete fence along Ashenti Road.

Ramaphosa announced the project in his 2020 State of the Nation Address, promising a home for 350,000 to 400,000 people by 2030. The Greater Lanseria Master Plan went to Public Works for comment in November 2022, and the project is still not registered with Infrastructure South Africa, which a parliamentary committee attributed to instability in the City of Johannesburg.

The station sits inside a R120bn provincial plan adding roughly 150km of track and 19 gazetted stations, with construction meant to start in 2026 and operations by 2030.

That plan rests on a network whose ridership fell from 13.9 million trips in 2019/20 to 7.9 million in 2023/24, against an original projection of 47 million by 2025. Daily passengers dropped from about 55,000 pre-COVID to just over 13,000.

MyBroadband documented the site visits and the fence, and notes the solar streetlights installed this year were a City Power project unrelated to the smart city. TimesLIVE reports the Gautrain Management Agency is at an advanced stage of appointing a private partner for the next 15 years, while PMG records officials telling parliament the project should break ground within 12 to 18 months.

The precinct plan itself is sound. Requiring a coordinated digital backbone instead of letting each developer trench its own fibre is exactly right, and it is the thing South Africa usually gets wrong by default. The problem is sequencing.

Six years in, there is a master plan, a precinct plan, gazetted station names and one water treatment plant, on a site where the notable change is a fence that stops short of an informal settlement. Meanwhile, the anchor transport asset is a rail network carrying a quarter of its pre-COVID daily load.

Read Lanseria as a signal about where Gauteng intends to put bulk services over the next decade, which genuinely matters for land and logistics siting. Do not put 2030 occupancy in a model. Announcements move faster than trenches here.

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