Metrorail Western Cape

Metrorail Western Cape is a commuter rail system operating in the Cape Town metropolitan area and surrounds, in the Western Cape province of South Africa. The system operates as a division of the national PRASA, and forms part of the broader national Metrorail network.

The system serves the City of Cape Town, Drakenstein, Stellenbosch, and Swartland. It connects central Cape Town with areas such as Malmesbury, Paarl, Stellenbosch, Wellington, Strand, Mitchells Plain, Khayelitsha, and Simon’s Town. Some areas, including the Atlantic Seaboard, Durbanville, and parts of Blouberg do not have rail access.

Annual ridership totaled 22.7 million passengers for the 2025 financial year.

In 2017, the City of Cape Town suggested that it be allowed to directly manage the local Metrorail network. This followed years of decline in passenger numbers while the system was managed by the national Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (PRASA). The City criticized PRASA's management of what it said was the foundation of Cape Town's public transit system.

An investigation into the feasibility of the city running the local rail network instead of PRASA found that the City could not only return the rail service to 2012 passenger levels, but could also build new lines and provide around 54,000 new housing units on vacant or underutilized land around the city's 92 train stations. The City also said it could properly manage the 48 hectares of leasable land that was managed by PRASA, and turn them into economic hubs.

As rail service quality continued to decline under the network's management by PRASA, the City of Cape Town's push for direct management of the system within its jurisdiction continued to increase. Indicative of the system's decline, the total number of trips operated by PRASA in Cape Town on an average weekday decreased from 444 in 2019 to 153 in 2022 (a 65.5% decline in three years).

In April 2022, Mayor of Cape Town Geordin Hill-Lewis announced that the National Treasury had given its support for a feasibility study into the City of Cape Town managing its own Metrorail network. Hill-Lewis noted the significant decline in PRASA rail services, highlighting the fact that the total number of train sets in operation had declined from 95 in 1995 to just 33 in 2020.

The Mayor confirmed that a tender had been issued by the City to operate the Metrorail system within the metro's jurisdiction. He further stated that the Constitution of South Africa supported the city's push to manage its own rail network. Hill-Lewis noted that the Constitution states that a municipality must be assigned a function when there is adequate capacity at the municipal level to perform said function, and when there is an agreement between the national and local governments. The Mayor called this "functional federalism".