Assessment of fuel price, exchange rate and unemployment rate impact on road passenger journeys in South Africa

ABSTRACT

In recent decades passenger transportation journeys experienced a decline and this decline may due to various causes such as cost of transportation, low economic growth, exchange rate volatility, unemployment and petrol price. [...]to the best knowledge of the author, no study was conducted to determine the relationship between the aforementioned variables. [...]the main objective of the current study is to analyse the impact of the exchange rate, petrol price and unemployment rate on road passenger journeys in the South African transportation sector. [...]to minimize either monetary budget or physical and mental burden, irrespective of having their cars, people prefer to use public transport (Guo & Wilson, 2011;Onderwater & Kishoon, 2017). South African road transport depend on the imported fuel and the price of the latter within the domestic market is determined by the exchange rate. [...]the exchange rate is another economic variable that impacts road transpo0rt demand (Havenga et al., 2014).