SOWETO, South Africa—Since the days of apartheid, when blacks were required to live in distant townships like this, Susan Hanong, a 67-year-old maid, has commuted to the wealthy northern suburbs of Johannesburg, one of the spectral figures trudging through darkened streets on long trips to wash white people's clothes and mind their children.

But at dawn recently, after walking through Soweto to the sounds of roosters crowing and her sandals slapping against her feet, Hanong beheld a vision of urbanity: a stylish, new high-tech bus station. As the doors of a gaily colored bus whooshed closed behind her, she claimed a front-row seat reserved for the elderly and settled in for a smooth, tranquil ride, so different from her usual experience on careering, jam-packed minibus taxis.

“;These people on taxis, they shout at us,”; she said. “;They say, 'Granny, just move!' They talk funny to the people. On the bus, no one can shout at you, you see.”;

South Africa has erased apartheid from its statute books, but the racist schemes of white minority rule remain engraved on the landscape in an extreme form of residential segregation. Millions of blacks still live in townships far from centers of commerce and employment. Those with jobs, like Hanong, must endure commutes that devour their time and meager incomes, while legions of jobless people are isolated from opportunity.

The new Bus Rapid Transit systems planned for South Africa's major cities in recent years have promised to ease those hardships by providing fast, affordable, dignified travel on bus lanes cleared of other vehicles.

Prodded by a national commitment to improve public transportation for soccer's 2010 World Cup, Johannesburg is carrying out the nation's most ambitious program. The city confidently predicted that buses would be rolling from Soweto, where a quarter of the city's 4 million residents live, to Sandton, the region's commercial and financial hub, by this June.

But its bus project is falling short of that goal, and has also become a reminder of just how challenging it is for South Africa to transcend its scarred history. Beyond the usual logistical delays and a recession-related slowdown in financing, the project has confronted resistance from both suburbanites in what were once exclusively white enclaves and from some in the black-owned minibus taxi industry that sprang up during apartheid.

Rehana Moosajee, the City Council member who leads Johannesburg's Transportation Department, ruefully acknowledged that the buses would not reach Sandton before the current city administration's term expired next year, and she offered no certain prediction about when they would make it there.

“;The transport system tells a very big story of the psyche of the nation,”; she said, explaining that the country still had a long way to go in bridging racial and class divides.

The city's first challenge was to win over the formidable minibus taxi industry, which moves 14 million people daily in a nation of 49 million, far more than the bus and rail systems combined. It is perhaps the country's greatest success story of black entrepreneurship, though with a history of ruthless violence. Experts estimate that hundreds, if not thousands, of people have died in “;taxi wars”; to control routes in this lucrative cash business.

The city has sought to get the industry involved by offering taxi proprietors ownership of the bus operating company, but negotiations have dragged on, and some in the industry remain fiercely opposed.

After the bus line began running five months ago, along a 16-mile route from Soweto to the central business district, a bus was fired on and a passenger and a policewoman on it were hit. Gunmen shot at the home of Moosajee, hitting her security guard in the neck. And Vananda Khumalo, a taxi industry official and advocate for a deal with the city, was killed. There have been no arrests, Moosajee said.

The city has also faced steely opposition from suburbanites that some officials describe as a classic case of not-in-my-backyard resistance. At a packed meeting in November 2008, residents from the strand of stately, still mostly white communities along the heavily traveled Oxford Road shouted down city officials who were trying to describe proposed bus routes, including one that would use two of Oxford Road's four lanes for buses.

“;They just stood up and said, 'No, no, no, no!”;' recalled Tessa Turvey, a resident married to a mining industry entrepreneur. Turvey has since honed a sharp message in defense of her neighborhood, Saxonwold, where flowering jacaranda trees arch over tranquil streets, and large homes are adorned with rose gardens, swimming pools and lush greenswards.

In a letter to the city, the neighborhood association's members welcomed a mass transit system, but opposed what they considered hastily and ill-conceived routes that they said would pollute the air, cause traffic to spill onto side streets, endanger pedestrians, increase crime and damage property values.

Already, residents are raising money for legal battles.

“;We do have individuals in the suburb who would be willing to pay anything to protect it,”; Turvey said.

Turvey, who is white, was dismissive of those who contended that the suburbs were guarding white privilege, noting that much of the black political elite now lived in these same neighborhoods, including Nelson Mandela. “;This is not a race issue,”; she said indignantly.

But Shireen Ally, a sociologist at the University of the Witwatersrand and a resident of Killarney, one of the affected suburbs, said race had everything to do with the suburbs' reaction. At the raucous 2008 meeting, Ally said she grew angry as resident after resident in the overwhelmingly white audience said the bus project would damage their property values. Ally, who grew up in Lenasia, a township south of Soweto for Indians, chided residents with cars for not considering the needs of people dependent on public transport.

One in six working women in South Africa is a housekeeper or nanny. Families in the northern suburbs depend on these women, the overwhelming majority of them black, to mop their floors, iron their clothes and clean their toilets. Ally, who wrote her dissertation on domestic workers, said she was disturbed by “;the incapacity of these suburbanites to think about it from the perspective of the women they trust their children and home to, the women they call part of the family.”;

Shortly after 5 a.m., while the suburbs slumbered, Hanong stepped out from her small, tidy home in Soweto, a pocketbook dangling from her arm, resolutely bound for the housekeeping job she has held for a quarter century. She kissed her 14-year-old nephew, Jabu, goodbye. She has cared for him since his father, a taxi driver in Durban, was killed in the industry violence there.

As she headed out, taxis were already cruising township streets. Their headlights illuminated the tide of people flowing to bus and taxi stops.

Just months earlier, Hanong, who has never learned to read, was still catching taxis close to home. But her preference for the new buses is so strong that she walks an extra half hour to reach them. They cost about 65 cents each way, a savings of about 50 cents over taxi fare, a considerable sum, given her earnings of $160 a month.

“;It's comfort,”; she said.

Even so, she has to transfer to a taxi to get to Sandton. Transportation still gobbles up a fifth of her salary.

On the new Brazilian-made bus, Hanong gazed out the window as it rumbled through Soweto, past Soccer City, the World Cup stadium, then deeper into the apartheid era's “;buffer zone”; of mine dumps, factories and undeveloped land that separated blacks from whites.

Once downtown, she walked to the vast, grimy minibus depot. Her taxi barreled down Twist Street, pedestrians scattering ahead of it as it accelerated to the rhythm of Zulu pop. Battalions of taxis on the highway into the suburbs joined Audis, BMWs and Mercedes Benzes.

Two hours after she left home, Hanong stepped down in Sandton and headed to the townhouse of her employer, who works in a real estate office.

There, she shed her tan dress to reveal a baby blue uniform and matching apron. She stripped the bedsheets, loaded the washing machine and put the dishes away with a soft clatter. When her boss' white cat trotted into the kitchen, Hanong pleasantly asked him, “;Why not have your breakfast?”;