Cape Town – The recent fuss in the media and on social networks over the South African Roads Agency Limited’s plans to toll roads in the Western Cape has had at least one tangible effect. Bikers Against E-Tolls in Cape Town has now definitively outgrown its original home in Keizergracht.
The staging point for this weekend’s BAT protest ride – which is open to any vehicle that will have to pay tolls if Sanral succeeds in tolling all the existing national roads into and out of the Cape Peninsula – will be the Grand Parade, literally in the shadow of the balcony where the people of Cape Town welcomed the tall old man who had brought them together in freedom, more than 20 years ago.
And it is that freedom, that right to tell the people who govern us, “Enough - so far and no further!” that the bikers of Cape Town and their friends will celebrate on Sunday morning, when they fly the BAT flag along the very roads where their freedom is at stake.
ROLL AT 10
Be there at 9am to roll at 10 sharp and if your bike, car or pod racer is decorated with the bat flag or a sign explaining in suitably Capetonian vernacular exactly where Sanral can stick its e-tags, so much the better.
The route will take riders from the Parade along Darling Street, Keizergracht, Tennant Street, and Roeland Street on to De Waal Drive, thence to the N1, the R300 and Plattekloof Road to Koeberg Road and Stella Cove in Montague Gardens.
The end venue will the Dukes of Hazzard, which will also be hosting a fundraiser for Bondi Rossouw, who has muscular dystrophy and has been trying to raise money to convert his bike into a trike so that he can keep riding, as he is no longer able to hold the bike up.
At the end of last year Rossouw was let down by a mechanic who disappeared leaving him with the bike - literally - in pieces and no money to rebuild it, hence this weekend’s fundraiser as a gesture from Cape Town’s bikers towards one of their own in need.