‘On yer bike” goes the typically blunt English expression to tell someone to get moving, get out of your face, or simply get lost because of a difference of opinion.
I’ve been told to get on my bike in myriad different ways since last week’s column about the department of transport’s brilliant scheme to solve the growing problem of traffic congestion on the N1 Joburg-Pretoria highway by shutting down the outside lane to speeding, one person, one car traffic — making it available strictly to Putco buses, gangster-owned combi taxis and those rare South African citizens who are prepared to let someone share the plush leather seats of their BMWs as they zoom back and forth to Tshwane Municipality. The rest of us can continue to waste time and fuel in the backed up, crawling haze of each other’s petrol fumes. Serves us right.
Like so many other issues of social policy in the new South Africa, the main problem is skilfully avoided. The fact that one has to go to Pretoria at all, just because Paul Kruger decided a hundred years ago that he wasn’t going to have his hard-won, Afrikaans-speaking political capital in Negro-Jewish Johannesburg, but on sombre, Boer farmland to the north, is bad enough. All the brave talk about establishing a single, political/economic capital somewhere around Halfway House, cutting out all this expensive commuting (and cutting out the distant legislative capital of Cape Town along the way) has been quietly forgotten.
Instead, we have the ever-receding legend of the Shilowa Express, conceived with the wealthy tourist in mind. The powers-that-be waste little breath on opening up to public debate the possibility that public transport as a whole should be taken more seriously. That a user-friendly rail link from the centre of Johannesburg to downtown Pretoria might substantially alleviate the problem, for example, and that a sensible, well-run, city-owned public transport system (trams and cleaner buses would be ideal) when you get to your destination would leave the air purer and the nation’s eager mind’s fresher for the tasks ahead on an average working day.
Instead, misleading definitions have become accomplished facts. Combi taxis, those lethal weapons of mass destruction generally owned by various anti-social township warlords for personal profit, have been allowed to fall into the lexicon of ”public transport”, simply because the public as a whole has no other way of getting around. City and national governments are able to conveniently wash their hands of the problem by the mere existence of this privately owned, Mafia-like network of passenger carriers. The public has been rudely told to fall back on its own devices and leave the government to get on with more important matters.
On yer bike indeed. The fact is, when you come to think about it, the only time you see somone on a bike in South Africa is on Sundays, when you have to avoid all those well-toned whities — helmets on their heads and brightly coloured lycra shorts clinging to their hairy thighs — preparing for the 94.7 Cycle Challenge or the Cape Argus Cycle Tour, or possibly just getting into shape for the next ethnic war that certain senior politicians have been predicting in recent days. The population as a whole generally regards the bicycle as a shameful and demeaning object of loathing and degradation.
This is something that I have been curious about for a long while. In other African countries the cheap and practical bicycle creaks about everywhere, in town and countryside equally. Husbands ferry wives and children on crossbars and on the buttock-flaying carriers at the back. Farmers ride down rutted tracks with the week’s produce swaying dangerously behind them, and market traders vie with each other as they weave in and out of motorised traffic, their wares on their heads, strapped to the sides or tied anywhere else to the two-wheeled, muscle-powered machine that inventiveness permits people in the struggle to get around and earn a living.
South Africans generally wouldn’t be seen dead on a bicycle. It’s just not the done thing. Rather risk life and limb in a rudely crammed combi than let the neighbours see you with your skirt tucked into your underpants, pedalling off to town. A bicycle would make you look like any other old African moegoe.
All over Asia the bicycle is looked on with far greater respect. But it is not only the Third World that takes advantage of the many benefits to health and sanity that the bicycle represents. Holland is an astonishing example of a highly developed country where bicycles far outnumber motor cars and 4x4s as the commuter vehicle of choice. Only in Beijing and Shanghai, it is said, can you see more bicycles per capita taking possession of the roads than in Amsterdam.
Women, men and children, young and old, make their energetic way to work, to the shops, to the drug cafés and to school or college on pretty plain bikes. The foreign visitor has to be more careful about being knocked over by a speeding bicycle than being run over by a car when crossing the street. Bikes seem to travel wherever they like, with or against the flow of traffic. Far from being a symbol of shameful poverty, the Dutch bicycle is a sign of speedy commuting and practicality in one of the richest societies on the globe.
Stop complaining, my readers tell me. South Africa is at the cutting edge. On yer bike.