Kampala’s proposed cycling lanes: Potholes, sewage and traffic hostility

Uganda’s roads are some of the most dangerous in the world: the safety of pedestrians and cyclists is a real concern, and in 2012 the government passed a law to better protect them.

Driving isn’t much fun either. Know as “the jam”, severe traffic is a daily headache for road users. Taxi driver Daniel Thembo says the city can be congested for hours every morning and evening, while “sometimes on Mondays and Fridays it lasts all day”.

Amanda Ngabirano, a lecturer in urban planning at Makerere University, puts this down to bad organisation rather than too many cars on the road. “We don’t have many traffic lights,” she says “so we all find ourselves at the same junction at the same time.”

Ngabirano is working with the Kampala Capital City Authority Association (KCCA) on plans for a downtown car-free zone for bicycles, which will start with a pilot on Namiermbe Road, a congested area almost impossible to navigate by car.

They’ve deliberately picked the most “hostile” and “complicated” part of the city to start with: “where the people are, and where there is demand,” she explains. “Once we succeed there we will able to change other places very quickly.” Construction is due to begin in December.

Ngabirano wants Kampala to mirror the other pioneering cycle cities of the world like Bogota in Colombia, which runs car free Sundays, and The Hague in The Netherlands, which started to experiment with specialised bike lanes in the 1980s. “People think the differences [to Kampala] are huge, incomparable, but there are some basic principles that influence the way people move the world over – we are just human,” she says.

Tyres over limbs

But planning is only part of the battle. For Ngabirano “the key intervention is to successfully convince politicians about what cycling could do for Uganda and Ugandans.”

At the moment, most people who use their bikes on the roads are those living in poverty. “When it’s not safe it’s for the person who has no other choice, and the person who has no other choice is poor, you cannot deny that relationship,” says Ngabirano.

“It does not make sense that we prioritise cars with four tyres, but we ignore normal human beings whose legs don’t have spare parts,” she adds, before mentioning climate change, another harbinger of change for the continent: “In Africa we need to get it straight: people first, cars second.”

Ngabirano’s love for cycling led her to be profiled as “babe of the week” by Uganda’s national newspaper, The Observer, which even led with the words “back in the day, it was an eyesore for a woman in Kampala to ride a bicycle”.

She wasn’t offended, she says. As one of the few women regularly cycling in the city she feels it’s a good thing that people take notice.

Yet she does recognise the need to for a special effort to get more women involved, who she says would benefit from the freedom bicycles can offer: “If the family has one car, it is for the man in the house. This makes the woman so dependent,” she explains.

Ngabirano isn’t the only one trying to encourage more cycling in the city: from car-free days, a free bike-sharing scheme at Makerere University for students to ride around campus, to the annual Tour De Kampala, the city is making meaningful strides to encouraging cyclists to take to its roads.

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