The Department of Transport and Public Works (DTPW) in conjunction with the Department’s Provincial Bicycle Distribution Programme via the Provincial Sustainable Transport Programme (PSTP), has been busy during the lock-down period distributing bicycles for non-motorised transport initiatives to a number of NPO’s and safety programmes in and around Cape Town.
This week the project delivered 59 bicycles to projects in Langa, Atlantis and Dunoon.
|
Langa |
Siviwe Tours |
9 |
|
Atlantis |
Ikamva Lisezandleni Zethu |
5 |
|
Atlantis |
Atlantis Community Policing Forum (CPF) |
10 |
|
Atlantis |
The Mamre Projects |
15 |
|
Dunoon |
Fertile Ground |
10 |
|
Dunoon |
Sibabalwe Dunoon Business Forum |
5 |
|
Dunoon |
Kamokalo Designs |
5 |
The provision of these bicycles to essential workers is to enable them to have safe, reliable and convenient transport to reach township communities.
One such project is the Happy Feet Youth Project, which is an after-school project founded in 2007 that runs 4 satellite kitchens, feeding 600 people per day in Langa. They will use the bicycles to run between the kitchens and deliver food-making sure they can be more effective and feed even more people in the community.
The encouragement and promotion of bicycle use as the preferred mode of transport assisting township communities, is essential in fighting poverty.
The Community Gardening projects that are run in the townships making sure that food security is a priority, will benefit from the bicycles as moving between the gardens, the bicycles, will be very key, as communication, sharing of seedlings and vegetables will be an easier task as these projects are lacking transportation.
The reassurance of the government and private sector to embrace and support non-motorised transport by providing cycling infrastructure, better urban planning and incentivising those who cycle to work.
DTPW is also working with Community Action Networks (CANs) which have shown a remarkable emergence in diverse neighbourhoods in Cape Town (and now also elsewhere in the country).
An initial objective of each CAN was to ensure that vulnerable members of the local community would be supported during lockdown. But given social and spatial inequalities in the city, their purpose soon grew to promote and show solidarity across communities.
This has been expressed most strongly in the pairing of CANs in poorer and better-off areas, to support the exchange of information and ideas, and to ensure that essentials could be channelled to those most in need.
The Langa Bicycle Hub which is part of Langa CAN has been using bicycles to transport food donations to Covid-19-positive people working with local clinics and old age homes in the communities of Langa. They collect medication from the clinic and distribute it to bedridden beneficiaries in the community.
Media Enquiries:
Jandré Bakker
Head of Communication
Department of Transport and Public Works
Email: Jandre.Bakker@westerncape.gov.za