CityCyclingEdinburgh was launched on the 27th of October 2009 as "an experiment".
IT’S TRUE!
CCE is 15years old!
Well done to ALL posters
It soon became useful and entertaining. There are regular posters, people who add useful info occasionally and plenty more who drop by to watch. That's fine. If you want to add news/comments it's easy to register and become a member.
RULES No personal insults. No swearing.
Hi!
Lyndsey and I have bought a couple of bikes to get about town. Some bits are better here (slower traffic), some bits are worse (the heat & the motorbike taxis are a challenge, and the pollution is really bad in places). Still, we've found a nice fairly quiet route.
Here's our commute:
http://africanpostcards.wordpress.com/2014/08/10/kampala-commute/
Great blog! Bet you're missing the weather.
Thanks!
Now we've got bikes we can start being the CCE Kampala correspondents! I've just had an email back from a woman who has been campaigning for cycling (and other related things) here in Kampala. I think she organised a bike to work day here last year that was quite popular. The challenges here are a little different, the heat (combined with the steep hills) is a real limit, also serious cultural barriers: both gender (some consider it very inappropriate for a woman to cycle) and superficial/appearance (people put a great deal of effort into looking very smart - so I suspect cycling would be the antithesis of this smart, slightly old fashioned [in the uk] formality). On the other hand (like in the uk) there's a lot of variation. I feel variation is greater here (maybe due to greater inequality or due to the large divide between those who have grown up in the city compared to new arrivals, or maybe due to the different tribal, ethnic and linguistic groups)... Maybe I'm not sure about all that, but commuter cycling is definitely not yet a middle class thing here (yet?)
I was going to say I was impressed by your potholes but then I saw this
Friends of ours who were in Malawi used to cycle to work together on a tandem. I've a feeling they had become something of a tourist attraction by the time they left...
Look forward to hearing more of your Uganda adventures. I wish I'd thought to bring or get a bike when we were in Swaziland, although the traffic was lethal.
How soon before you arrange a Pedal on Parliament?
Stellenbosch felt like a huge culture clash last week -- part european university town with students cycling to college (not a helmet in sight), part trendy sports cyclists - mostly mountainbikers on seriously high end bikes, and some manual workers - although rather than the old style messengers bikes that you see elsewhere on the continent, they were mostly on cheap imported hybrids.
Cape Town was devoid of bikes in the townships/informal areas (didn't get to any former white suburbs), but there were lots on the roads about Table Mountain/Signal Hill.
@sallyhinch, wow - I heard on the BBC that there was a bit of a storm back home.
Re Cycling-as-a-tourist-attraction: We're also getting a lot of stares. I feel like we're moving disaster areas - as we get so much attention people just aren't looking where they're going - we've seen two very close near-misses where someone's just been staring at us instead of looking where they're going.
Re Traffic - we've found a fairly quiet route to our work places but we have taken them into/around town a few of times, and it seems to be not tooo bad - it looks worse than it is - if that makes sense?
I'm not sure I'm going to organise political protests for the moment, however benign. Even (especially?) at the university there's regular clashes between students and riot police (teargas, etc).
@SRD: Cycling here is mostly on ancient single speed old bikes or on shiny looking ones (around Kololo). There's a bunch of expats that go mountain biking too. Our bikes definitely have the feel of 'bike-shaped-object' about them, but they're just about working. Mine's a tad small, but it was the largest frame size I could fine.
We cycled a bit in Cape Town, but we found it really quite terrifying. Very aggressive drivers, etc. Way better here: People always letting us in, being friendly etc. Fewer aggressive drivers here than in the UK too, I think... (also the bodas everywhere mean people have to be paying attention to spot bicycle-sized-vehicles maybe)
New, segregated cycle lanes in Kampala. A pretty awesome achievement.
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