Commuting on bikes is the answer, but the road to getting it right in SA is rocky

South Africans need to get into the saddle, say advocates for a cycling culture, but it’s not going to happen in the fast lane as barriers persist.

Sindile Mavundla, speaking at the recent Rise Africa conference on sustainable cities, said: “We’ve been trying to create a cycling culture in Khayelitsha and it has not been easy. But from five years ago to today, there has been an amazing change.”

He is a co-founder of Khaltsha Cycling, which teaches township dwellers how to cycle, sells affordable bicycles and organises monthly communal rides to promote safe cycling in communities.

Working tirelessly to build a cycling culture, he has experienced the ups and downs first-hand.

“We are trying to introduce a mode of transport that was used back in the day before the vehicle came along. Now we’re bringing back the bike, but there is no infrastructure for it,” he said.

Another problem he and co-founders Juma Mkwela and Divinia Stevens encountered when they began five years ago was a perception that it’s “the poor man’s transport”.

They started bringing about change by introducing classes, but as people learnt how to ride, they felt they didn’t have access to affordable bikes.

We used to have a lot of safety issues with people being hit by cars. We had to form a really good relationship with taxi drivers so they would notice us and respect bicycles.

—  Sindile Mavundla, co-founder of Khaltsha Cycling

So the trio started Khayelitsha’s first bike shop and since then it has grown into a community drive as people also needed help understanding the nuts and bolts of commuting longer distances on a bike.

Another issue that needed fixing was safety.

“We used to have a lot of safety issues with people being hit by cars. We had to form a really good relationship with taxi drivers so they would notice us and respect bicycles.”

An even harder place to pioneer the bike for commuting has been in Durban.

Mavundla went about doing on-the-ground research, looking at commutes from Umlazi, KwaMashu and Umhlanga into the CBD.

“Extreme sports.” That is how he describes the hair-raising experience of crossing some of the busy intersections to get to the CBD, particularly from Umlazi and KwaMashu.

Speaking more about their field research, he said: “We used different apps to find where people are cycling and what routes are available. You either have to get onto a huge highway with four lanes, riding in a yellow line, so you’re a sitting duck, or get into the smaller sections where there is a lot of traffic.”

Cycling to the more affluent Umhlanga revealed infrastructure that has been built for this purpose, but they discovered people use it for leisure to get to the promenade at weekends, not for commuting to and from work.

Chatting to people in Durban, Mavundla found many would “love to ride bikes, but are terrified. The biggest challenge is navigating the city with taxi drivers in the mix.”

The first step to overcoming these barriers to a commuter cycling culture in SA is understanding them.

That’s what George Ellison, from the University of Johannesburg, went about doing earlier this year, with the results published in the journal Transportation in Developing Economies.

He looked at the structural and attitudinal barriers to cycle-based transport in Gauteng and found that of the nearly 26,500 houses included in the study, only about 8% owned a bike.

Also, “those that owned a car had over five times the odds of also owning a bicycle”.

More than two-thirds of households with cars used these to make various trips, yet of all the bicycle owners, only “3.2% ... reported cycling”.

The most commonly cited problem (a third of all respondents) is that they do not know how to cycle.

This was double the number of those who cited the risk of an accident as the biggest problem.

Fourteen percent said the main issue was the destination being too far, one-tenth said crime, just under one-tenth said it was too much effort and 5% said the lack of good paths was the biggest problem.

Poorer households were far more likely to cite not knowing how to ride as the biggest issue, while those from more affluent homes were more concerned with risk and a lack of effort.