Kirsten Wilkens admires places like Paris, where bike lanes have sprung up in response to COVID-19. And Milan, with its expansive piazza that affords people the luxury of space and the ability to move about safely. “But that is not the story of Cape Town,” she candidly remarked at the Daring Cities recent session on Active Mobility.

As Managing Director of Open Streets Cape Town, the city Wilkens knows all too well is one where “some people walk faster to be safe… some of us can’t travel at night or unaccompanied.” A city where bike jackings and muggings are an everyday occurrence and “our streets have been purposely used to divide our people by race and class,” and are part of an ongoing narrative about disposition.

The starting point for this journey is to rethink current transport planning, which she says is dominated by engineering guidelines and standards and a “one size fits all approach made for everyone but is good for no one.” Limited perspectives such as promoting electric vehicles as a solution to the city’s environmental challenges are simply not good enough, she opined. “Transportation needs to be more.”

Rather than wait for transportation solutions from conventional, old school approaches to materialize, Open Streets’ response has been to begin solving Cape Towns’ mobility challenges through such citizen-led, ground-up solutions as the Bike Bus.

Rather than wait for transportation solutions from conventional, old school approaches to materialize, Open Streets’ response has been to begin solving Cape Towns’ mobility challenges through such citizen-led, ground-up solutions as the Bike Bus.

Read the full article about fighting climate change by Mark Wessel at Shareable.