By Dave Abrahams
With little more than a week to go before the planned introduction of e-tolling in Gauteng, the protest rides organised by Bikers Against e-Tolls seem to be taking on a new urgency.
Hundreds of riders - nearly double the turnout for the previous Cape Town BAT ride - gathered on Keizergracht in the CBD on Saturday for the third such protest, escorted by the motorcycle patrolmen of the city’s Traffic Services.
They ranged from inarticulate teens on scruffy scooters and 400’s to mainstream riders on beautifully presented cruisers and expensively leathered hotshots on the latest sports bikes, each festooned with statements - some printed on elegant silk flags, others hand-lettered on sheets of stiff paper - all expressing their opposition to being charged for riding on roads that had already been paid for, often in terms too graphically anatomical to be reprinted here.
“We’re not going to go away.”
Gauteng BAT organiser Shaun Pfister told the riders that the protest movement against tolling in general, and e-tolling in particular, was not going to be a short-term campaign. BAT, he said, was in it for the long haul, and Sanral was beginning to take note.
“Keep on attending the rides,” he said, “Keep pressuring the authorities; it’s not going to happen overnight but it will bear fruit.”
As has become a BAT tradition, the ride took in some of the Cape’s proposed toll roads - the N2, R300 and N1 - in a wide loop that ended at a popular biker’s pub in Montague Gardens, its signage driving home the point to every four-wheeled motorist they passed that all it takes is for the majority to do nothing, and one day we will all have to pay to use the roads our taxes built.