Velo-city 2001 Glasgow, 21 September 2001
Chairperson
Greetings from South Africa, and thank you for the invitation to participate in this important conference. May I also offer my congratulations to Velo-city for turning 21 this year. Where better to hold your coming-of-age conference than in Scotland, the birthplace of the inventor of the bicycle, Kirkpatrick MacMillan?
I have learned that the Velo-city series of cycle planning conferences was launched in 1980 to discuss the role cycling can play in town planning, transport reform and civil engineering. This year I see that you have expanded your focus to take in themes like the contribution cycling can make to health, tourism and children's mobility. I am inspired by the increasing importance that countries in Europe are giving to the role of cycling in the overall transport modal mix. The achievements of the Netherlands and Denmark as global leaders in bicycle transport are well known to all of us. But I am also greatly impressed by the energy that is being devoted to promoting cycling and providing dedicated cycling facilities in the United Kingdom as a whole and here in Scotland in particular.
It is refreshing to see the paradigm shift that is under way amongst decision makers and planners in the developed world. When you started holding these gatherings twenty years ago, the private car was still king, and historic city centres were still being gouged by motorways and flyovers that, in some cases, came close to turning them into urban wastelands.
You learned that pollution, congestion and social alienation were the inevitable consequences that flowed from tearing the heart out of your cities, and now you are putting them back together again - restoring them to a human scale that once again allows people to walk safely, talk to each other, breathe and think. And you have found that the re-humanisation of the city does not have to carry with it any significant loss of mobility. You are re-discovering clean forms of public transport and, at long last, the bicycle seems to be finding the role that history intended for it.
Speaking of history, one of the many sad features of the relation between the developed and developing worlds has been our tendency to repeat your mistakes just as you are beginning to recognise and correct them. On a more hopeful note, however, the communications revolution of the last twenty years has so greatly improved our capacity to share knowledge and experience that we are not obliged to blindly go down the roads that you travelled in the sixties and seventies. We have of course already made many of the same mistakes that you made in urban development; and, in addition to this, we are still having to live with the consequences of the special grotesque twist that apartheid gave to urban blight by deliberately smashing the spaces in which decent human interaction could take place. But we are now better placed than ever before to learn from your recent experience and apply the lessons creatively as we continue with our own efforts of reconstruction and development.
In South Africa we are only just beginning to initiate a campaign to place bicycle transport planning and promotion on the agenda of users, planners, and politicians. This effort must be viewed within the context of a South African transport history that has neglected the role of the so-called "slow modes" of walking and cycling. South Africa's transport planners have historically provided high speed car use for the rich, very basic public transport for the working poor and totally inadequate facilities for the millions of urban and rural people with no option but to walk or cycle.
It is no wonder then that South Africa presents a mixture of both developed and developing country transport challenges. On the one hand we have high levels of suburban car use in our bigger cities - in most middle to high income areas car use accounts for over 80% of the trips to work. Because infrastructure planning in our cities has historically catered for high-speed motorised transport we have a situation in which private cars and minibuses have crowded out potential non-motorised forms of transport purely because of the safety risk.
On the other hand, walking long distances is the only means of getting to work for the great majority of rural people; and this is also the case for 20% of people in our medium-sized urban areas. Many people walk, not for choice, but because they have no available and/or affordable motorised option. In addition, most households can really only afford regular public transport for the work trip; other household trips - especially to school - have to be on foot.
This combination of relatively high car use, high pedestrian activity and motor vehicle-centred infrastructure planning has led to what can fairly be described as a non-motorised transport safety crisis. South Africa currently loses over 9,000 people a year to road crashes, with an extraordinarily high rate of pedestrian fatality - approximately 40% of all those killed on South African roads. We also start out from a very low modal share of cycling in the bigger urban areas - only about 1 percent of work trips being by bicycle.
For us, then, the biggest impediments to widespread bicycle use are safety concerns, affordability and simple lack of awareness of the advantages of cycling as a transport option on the part of both planners and potential users.
We recognise that turning this situation around to promote a better balance of modes is going to be difficult, given our historic legacy of spatial distortion and gross income differentials. This forces us to look at the fundamentals and make conscious use of the democratic transport planning mechanisms we have created over the last two years to start to prioritise cycling as an integral part of the modal mix
Bicycle transport is mostly local transport that involves shorter trips using local roads and routes. In the South African urban context this means a lot of promotional work and money will have to be invested in local transport authorities in order to lure them away from current practices. The big challenge here is how to do this without having large amounts of investment funding at our disposal, and in the absence of highly visible and vocal citizen pressure for the development of cycle transport. South Africa has up to now simply not been accustomed to "thinking bicycle" in any systematic way. In rural areas we don't face the same set of inherited pro-car planning prejudices, but on the other hand there is a desperate need for funding to upgrade infrastructure and start promoting affordable and appropriate bicycles as a Greenfield project.
Despite all these obstacles however, we have clearly signalled our intention to prioritise bicycle transport and we have started to make some progress with a handful of pilot projects. The South African National Department of Transport has developed what we call the Shova Kalula strategy. Shova Kalula means "Pedal Easy" in Zulu, and it aims to promote awareness of bicycle transport through a demonstration approach. Our philosophy is to learn by doing, to start small but to ensure that the effort is sustained. I have instructed my Department to take a chance, to get its hands dirty and to find a low-cost way of putting bicycle transport back onto the development agenda.
Our plan is to promote cycle use quickly in selected areas with low motor vehicle volumes. Over 60% of our 6 million motor vehicle registrations are in 3 of our nine provinces; or - to put it differently - over 60% of motor vehicles are used predominantly in the metropolitan areas of our four largest cities. Our approach assumes that in the short term cycling will be promoted as an alternative to longer distance walking or to not travelling at all, especially in rural and peri-urban areas and in our smaller town and city areas.
Just to indicate the huge potential for low cost mobility improvements: a recent survey of rural scholars in KwaZulu Natal Province showed that: 555 000 rural learners are walking for more than 40 minutes one-way to school. Of these 555 000, at least half are walking for more than 1 hour. The related survey of school principals revealed that 70% of students are visibly tired at school, 60% are often late and 58% are sometimes absent due to the effects of these long walking distances.
We aim to serve these lower-traffic areas by working with a non-governmental organisation called Afribike to establish community-based bicycle micro-businesses in refurbished shipping containers, which are run by local entrepreneurs. For the demonstration phase, we plan to establish 80 of these small container bicycle shops by the end of 2003 and expect to distribute up to 100 000 partially subsidised used and new bicycles via this network. Through this tactic we are confident that we will be able to demonstrate effective demand for affordable cycling in these neglected areas. We also hope to grow the bicycle market to encourage lower-cost supply as well as more localised assembly and possibly manufacturing.
Results from the first few container shops that have already been established are encouraging. We have already found that developing an effective partnership between a province or local authority and Afribike makes it possible rapidly to generate a greater demand for bicycle transport in rural areas. Obviously, the key medium term issue will be to ensure ongoing sustainable use. This will require further support being channelled into improving local infrastructure and promoting traffic safety as well as ensuring ongoing bicycle maintenance.
We estimate that a subsidy of up to US$30 per low-income bicycle user may be enough to promote bicycle transport and the required training and micro-business development. It must be emphasised that the approach we are developing is premised on the view that basic mobility is a social right. In translating this into reality, setting a viable target price becomes a critical consideration. Even a price of US$60 for a low cost bicycle is probably out of reach for a large number of households; hence the need to factor a partial subsidy into the unit price of every bicycle sold
In parallel with the promotion programme in lower-traffic areas, we also intend to develop a selected number of bicycle transport infrastructure demonstration projects in some of the low-income residential areas of our bigger cities. Already, plans for developing bicycle infrastructure are being developed for various residential areas in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Pretoria. Our approach here is to use these modest projects as case studies to influence transport planners and decision makers to pay proper attention to infrastructure design for cyclists.
A further project on the cards is to team up local and international bicycle infrastructure planning experts to conduct a strategic assessment of our current transport infrastructure standards and practices and to recommend bicycle-related infrastructure packages tailored to the specific conditions of rural, peri-urban, and small town populations.
Having dwelt on our tactical campaign to get bicycle transport moving again in South Africa, it is perhaps necessary to state that the medium term goal is to target not only lower-income walkers but higher-income car users as well.
Some of you probably know that every year in March my home city of Cape Town is host to the annual Argus Cycle Tour which is the biggest timed race for recreational riders in the world - attracting nearly 40 000 participants. Most of these participants are middle class private car users who form an immediate potential pool of urban bicycle transport users - but only if the appropriate infrastructure and support systems can be put in place to effect the switch from car to bike as preferred daily transport mode.
In this regard the challenge will be to build on the initial promotional campaign and to establish a few "flagship" projects with cities willing to encompass a large-scale citywide bicycle transport programme.
In conclusion, let me stress once again the hybrid first-world / third-world reality that is South Africa today. Though parts of South Africa have world-class road systems, we have no world-class bicycle transport systems. The situation is lamentable, but can and must be turned around, even if slowly and within our current constraints. We have made a start, and over the next two years we have two major goals: to roll out a network of bicycle shops in lower-income areas and to develop clear recommendations to guide transport and road infrastructure planners. Once these are in place, our medium term goal is to go after the car users in the bigger cities - but only with a carefully planned and well-funded campaign.
Having given you a sense of our priorities and general approach, let me now turn to you to provide advice, assistance and support for our programme in whatever ways you think would be most appropriate and practical. Since we are latecomers to the bicycle transport scene, we want to turn our disability into an advantage by avoiding the more obvious pitfalls of planning and funding and by learning all we can from the successes you have achieved.
I thank you for your attention.