Despite positioning itself as the home of the Cape Town Cycle Tour, the City municipality is asking citizens to vote in a move to ban bicycles on the famous Sea Point Promenade – setting a dangerous precent for non-motorised transport elsewhere, writes Gasant Abarder in a new #SliceofGasant.
Abarder, who recently launched his book, Hack with a Grenade, is among the country’s most influential media voices. Catch his weekly column here, exclusive to Cape {town} Etc.
The City of Cape Town would again have made a cool few hundred million rand in direct and indirect revenue from the iconic Cape Town Cycle Tour this past weekend. It is an event like no other and the biggest timed bike race of its kind in the world. All the city’s tourism heads need to do is sit back and cash in from the destination marketing and revenue the race garners.
In doing so, Cape Town has positioned itself as a cycling city like London and Amsterdam. So, it is curious then that it is calling on citizens to vote in a move that could see cycling on the Sea Point Promenade banned.
The city – if it has its way – will make the Prom exclusively for walkers and runners and shove the cyclists onto the much narrower pavement closest to the seaside. There have apparently been complaints that bike riders have hit pedestrians and runners.
But before I pick apart this illogical attempt at regulating non-motorised transport in the most archaic way, let me reflect on the reason the Cycle Tour was first conceived. More than 40 years ago, the Cycle Tour was originally dubbed ‘The Big Ride’ as a form of protest against the lack of cycling infrastructure.
The ride was a massive success and quickly captured the imagination of that pioneering businessman Raymond Ackerman of Pick n Pay and the then editor of The Argus newspaper Andrew Drysdale. The Argus Pick n Pay Cycle Tour was born – a celebration of the city and how cycling can transcend the fissures forged by our divided history.
Accordingly, the activism then was responsible for hundreds of kilometres of cycle lanes being built across the city. It put us in the same category as Amsterdam or London as a bike commuter city. With petrol as expensive as it is and public transport largely a rank failure, the humble bicycle has stood the test of time as a cheap, non-motorised mode of transport. It’s quiet, leaves a zero-carbon footprint and promotes a healthy lifestyle.
But the City of Cape Town is the reason I don’t ride my bike anymore. It does little to keep the kilometres of cycling lanes safe for commuter and leisure cyclists. Despite being clearly demarcated, riders are still subjected to motorists either driving in them or worse, parking there. Buses and trucks seldom regard cyclists as legitimate road users. And if you beat off these crazy odds of surviving, you’re faced with the increase of violent crime.
At one stretch of cycle lanes from the Cape Town CBD to Blouberg, runners, walkers and cyclists co-exist happily. But once the lanes disappear from plain sight from Milnerton onwards to the city, they’re a haven for muggers. Ride there at your own risk.
Banning cycling on the Promenade would not just be a lazy move but an exercise in tackling a low hanging fruit. There has been an increase in use of motorised scooters and e-bikes, which I agree, should go elsewhere. But the logic for banning bicycles is a purely knee jerk response. By this same notion then, we should ban cars when a motorist hits a pedestrian, ban guns because they kill people, ban cigarettes because they cause cancer, or alcohol because drunk driving has fatal consequences.
It wouldn’t surprise me if the city did all of these. Its bylaws have overreached to govern when and how buskers can operate (that saw the assault of a blind busker in the CBD a few years ago). Its noise and nuisance bylaw has pet owners worrying their dogs will bark incessantly for longer than two minutes. And then possibly the most contentious is how it effectively criminalises a religious call to prayer. Of course, these ridiculous bylaws are almost impossible to police.
Living in Cape Town is risky, it would seem, and those who run it love to play nanny.
The City of Cape Town, as a beneficiary of the Cycle Tour, would do well to remember its original intent. Banning cycling on the Prom is contrary to the spirit of protest of its founders. They would have wanted the city to be less distracted by the sideshow of the Prom, but to rather promote a noble and accessible mode of non-motorised transport by ensuring all cycling lanes were safer to use across the city.
Vote no to the ban on cycling at the Sea Point Promenade. Go to www.capetown.gov.za/haveyoursay
Also read:
Sea Point Promenade as a ‘pedestrians only zone’? Your results are in
Picture: Gasant Abarder