- Home deliveries in South Africa have surged in recent years, with delivery of food and groceries overwhelmingly done using motorcycles.
- One company, Green Riders, has seized a slice of this market for electric bicycles, highlighting some of the obstacles facing cyclists on Cape Town’s streets.
- The South African city’s planning includes efforts to shift commuters from using cars or buses — primarily to reduce traffic congestion — with limited success.
- The presence of several hundred couriers on e-bikes is highlighting issues including inadequate road infrastructure as well as safety for cyclists who must often travel 20 kilometers or more from their homes to reach economic opportunities.
CAPE TOWN — Siphe Mlawuli stands next to her e-bike outside a popular fast-food outlet in Table Bay, a Cape Town suburb. The sun has just set, giving the sky above Table Bay a pinkish hue. The fast-food outlet’s parking lot is crowded with vehicles belonging to food couriers.
Mlawuli’s phone screen lights up. She takes an insulated bag and goes inside to collect an order. A minute later she returns, carefully settles the order in the branded box bolted to the back of her e-bike box and sets off.
The heavy cargo bike moves effortlessly into the gathering dusk over the maze of suburban Parklands, the only sound a hum from its wide tires on the tarmac.
Home deliveries in South Africa have surged in recent years. Delivery of food and groceries are overwhelmingly done using motorcycles, but Mlawuli’s black e-bike signals a possible change. She is one of about 600 food-delivery couriers on Cape Town’s roads who rent e-bikes from a company called Green Riders.
Siphe’s journey
Mlawuli left her home in Elliot, a small town in the Eastern Cape, in 2018 with hopes of finding work in Cape Town. She lives in Dunoon, a township about 7 kilometers (4.3 miles) from Parklands. Since its establishment in 1996, two years after the formal end of apartheid, the area has grown into a dense cluster of informal dwellings. A report by the City of Cape Town says Dunoon and other settlements like it are a response to the “dire need for housing in close proximity to employment opportunities.”
Some of those opportunities are in the light industrial area adjacent to Dunoon. Others find work in nearby suburbs like Parklands, where wide, tree-shaded streets wind amongst free-standing homes, two- and three-story walkups, and larger four-story mixed-use developments. In Dunoon, crowded homes — many built with corrugated iron roofing sheets — often spill over onto the pavement of narrow streets barely wide enough for two cars to pass, let alone accommodate pedestrians and bicycles as well.
Mlawuli initially lived here with a relative but soon found a job that allowed her to rent her own place. After giving birth to her daughter, she stayed home for a while to look after her child, with help from her daughter’s father. In 2022, she was ready to work again.
As luck had it, Green Riders was recruiting young people in Dunoon to become food couriers. Mlawuli became the first woman to join them.
Each week, Mlawuli and her fellow riders pay Green Riders a bike rental fee of $50 (895 rand). Riders make an average of $1.7 (30 rand) per trip depending on which delivery platform offers the job and the distance they travel.
Riders who are just starting out can take three or four days to complete the 30 trips needed to cover their bike rental fee. Their first task is to “build their algorithm” by staying online and in close proximity to a number of popular fast-food chains. Their location and availability, coupled with the feedback customers give them, determines how many trips they are likely to get in the immediate future. This leads to them spending more than 12 hours in the city each day, regardless of the weather.
After two years of being a “green rider,” Mlawuli has learned the ropes and has become one of the top earning riders. She has also started earning more as a trainer for new recruits. She does five training sessions per week, two of which cover her bike fees.
Mlawuli says being a “green rider” has transformed her life.
Targeting South African youth
There are more than 40,000 motorcycle couriers in South Africa, overwhelmingly migrants from other parts of Africa, says Craig Atkinson, the founder of Green Riders. He believes South Africans avoid this work for cultural reasons, despite the relative ease of entry.
“For the people from Ghana and Kenya, they ride motorbikes on the freeway every single day. They understand what chaos feels like on a motorbike. We [South Africans] don’t have that in us,” he says.
He sees e-bikes as a way to overcome this perceived barrier to entry. This was true for Mlawuli, who says that the use of bicycles was what attracted her to Green Riders when she first encountered them.
However, using bicycles comes with its own challenges, one of them being the spatial legacy of apartheid. Roland Postma, a member of the Active Mobility Forum (AMF), a coalition making the case for better infrastructure to support walking and cycling in South African cities, says, “Cape Town has the [second] most non-motorized transportation in the country, after Johannesburg, but [the areas] are not connected.”
Apartheid’s spatial planning had zoned cities’ areas for specific races and separated them with major roads, sports fields and train tracks. In Cape Town, this means that areas that are next to each other often lack infrastructure that connects them. It also means that the majority of areas that were zoned for non-white people are far from commercial hubs and employment.
Postma emphasizes that the mobility forum is not saying that commuters should cycle 40 km (25 mi) to work each way. “We can cycle the last and first miles … we can have a multi-modal public transportation system.”
The appearance of several hundred Green Riders on the roads has highlighted some of the difficulties and dangers facing cyclists on Cape Town’s streets.
The Bonteheuwel cohort
Outside the main train station in Cape Town’s city center, Station Square, an ever-present group of food-courier motorcycles wait for orders from the fast-food outlets serving tens of thousands of commuters as well as residents of a large new housing complex overlooking the station. As in suburban Parklands, a group of Green Riders bicycles are lined up here as well.
A few of the bicycle couriers sit on the edge of a concrete planter in Station Square, close to their bicycles, passing time as they wait for orders. Austin Jones, 26, just back from a delivery, lines his bicycle up with the others, lets down his kickstand, and takes out a box of biscuits he bought with a cash tip to share with the other riders.
Jones lives in Bonteheuwel, a township situated about 20 km (12.5 mi) east of the city center that was created to house people who were designated as “Coloured” under apartheid.
Jones spoke to Mongabay a month after completing a training workshop along with a cohort of other new riders from Bonteheuwel. Previously unemployed, he jumped at the opportunity to become a food courier. Like the rest of the new riders, he is trying to “build his algorithm.” His location and availability, coupled with the feedback customers give him, determines how many trips he is likely to be assigned in the immediate future.
Jones’ priority is to establish himself as a reliable food courier as fast as possible. “I’m working on building up my ‘friendly service’ [score]” he says, speaking of one of the types of automated feedback clients can give the riders.
He commutes the 20 km (12.5 mi) into the city on his e-bike every morning, and spends all day in the city, mostly around Station Square, but also popping over to the Green Riders “Tech Hub,” a bike maintenance and support station nearby, to drop off a battery for charging
Like other riders from Bonteheuwel and similar low-income areas far from the city center, Jones says he gets more trips downtown — with a higher likelihood of receiving tips. The city center also offers them increased safety, with private security guards visible for most of the day.
Bonteheuwel, like many other areas on the Cape Flats, in Cape Town’s southeast, is plagued with gang violence. Jones and the others say they feel relatively safe where they live, but this doesn’t carry over to nearby neighborhoods where they would have to deliver food or other goods if they wanted to deliver closer to where they live.
This doesn’t mean that riders in the city bowl and surrounds don’t also experience safety risks.
“It’s just certain areas at certain times. But you just need to be aware of them [trying their luck]. There are places you can avoid, you avoid. And if you can’t avoid…I just go straight through,” says Jones. “The other day someone tried to rob me. I [fought him off] and still he tried to rob me.”
Beyond crime, sharing the congested inner-city streets with motorists is a daily hazard. Like most cities in Africa, Cape Town has no functioning cycling infrastructure.
“The current implementation of bicycle lanes does not reduce crashes and fatalities sufficiently, nor does it stimulate the uptake of cycling sufficiently. So, we don’t have appropriate cycling infrastructure at this moment in time. We need better implementation and possibly pilot different implementation strategies,” says Marianne Vanderschuren, an expert in transport planning and engineering at the University of Cape Town.
Critical mass
The Safe Passage project aims to upgrade existing cycling infrastructure such as bike lanes, as well as to add more cycling infrastructure where needed. The project is a joint effort between Young Urbanists, of which Postma is a member, the City of Cape Town, and the Supplier Development Trust Initiative. SDI supports Green Riders and the e-bike couriers are among the intended beneficiaries.
The first phase of the project will see the upgrading of a cycling lane in the inner city, subsequent phases will create and improve cycling infrastructure between the city and Langa, a township adjacent to Bonteheuwel, which will have a direct impact for riders like Jones. The upgrades will include bollards to keep cars and trucks out of bike lanes, but Postma says that the project goes beyond bike lanes. “We’re looking at solar lighting, we’re looking at upgrading minibus taxis, anything around tactical interventions that will result in safer, greener, and more equitable routes for the micro-businesses,” he said.
Atkinson says that one of the biggest challenges the riders face is cars and taxis parked in bike lanes. So far, however, Green Riders have been relatively unscathed. “In our three years of operation, with over 8.5 million kilometers traveled across our fleet, we’ve never had a fatality or a serious injury that permanently affected someone’s livelihood post-accident,” he said.
“In fact, 98% of all accidents result in only minor bruises or scratches. While I won’t sugarcoat it — it’s not pleasant — most riders are back to work the same day or the next,” he says.
Atkinson says one reason for the rareness of serious accidents — in comparison to their motorcycle counterparts — could be that the e-bike riders’ average speed is 25km/h.
“We know… that safe and dedicated cycling lanes, with barriers that are connected, is the biggest way to reduce road fatalities,” says Postma. He says he hopes better infrastructure will encourage more people to cycle
But Gail Jennings, a social scientist who has conducted extensive research into bicycle transport, says efforts to get more people to cycle shouldn’t be focused narrowly on building cycle lanes and safer infrastructure.
“The city’s non-motorized transport plans are focused on trying to get people who currently would [take public transport, minibus taxis, or drive] to cycle, a congestion mitigation [measure], and that’s a really hard thing to do,” Jennings says. She explains that the main reason people begin to commute with bicycles is because they see someone else of the same socio-economic standing as them doing so.
She says the bare fact of the Green Riders’ presence in the streets has huge potential for getting more people commuting on bicycles. “A lot of the time, people say, ‘I can’t go to work on a bicycle because I have to carry stuff’ … All of these little things show people that it’s possible.”
Decarbonizing the last mile
Postma says e-bikes are adding weight to advocating for better policy for non-motorized transport. “It means it’s much easier for us as policy makers, as civil society, as private sectors, and the government, to justify building more NMT because we know it’s going to create jobs. And decarbonize last-mile delivery.”
It’s not clear whether the infrastructure envisaged by the Safe Passage project will match the priorities of e-bike delivery riders themselves. Jennings points out that cyclists who have grown comfortable with carrying cargo are probably undeterred by riding in traffic.
Bike lanes mapped out to serve commuters might not make deliveries any faster and won’t protect them from robbers. But if the added bicycle infrastructure encourages more people to cycle instead of drive, it will lower traffic congestion, which should make the roads safer for food couriers as well, Vanderschuren says.
Atkinson says decarbonizing last-mile delivery is the reason for the “green” in Green Riders. “Our entire [delivery] industry boomed from 4,000 delivery riders pre-COVID to 50,000 post-COVID in a couple of years. If we bring new things into South Africa, let’s find a sustainable way of doing it, while creating jobs.”
With about 600 active riders around Cape Town at the end of 2024, he hopes that they will have 4,000 active riders by the end of 2025.
However, he acknowledges that many of the new couriers on bicycles see it as a stepping stone to other things.
“We quickly realized a lot of people will be with us for a year, maybe a year and a half, and then they find better and bigger things. [Through being a delivery rider] they built up a lot of confidence meeting new clients and understanding customer etiquette, so they see other opportunities as well. We’ve designed the ecosystem that lets you almost use this opportunity to get out there,” he says.
Jones is enthusiastic about exploring the streets in and around the city bowl. He and his fellow riders, most of whom are in their mid-20s, have an age-appropriate mix of purpose and bravado. While deliveries are a mostly solo affair during the day, riders seem to do more exploring in the evenings, with groups navigating the city bowl’s streets together when orders are slow to come in. Many also return to their homes in the city’s less-affluent suburbs in groups for safety and company.
Two years in, Mlawuli has reached a stage where she wants to purchase a bigger vehicle in a year’s time, one that will give her more opportunities for making money, especially as her daughter grows up and starts primary school
Until then, she continues to use her cherished e-bike. “If I had to name it, I would call it luphawu, my daughter’s name. It means ‘symbol,’ and this bike is a symbol. It’s my money maker,” she says and chuckles.
Banner image: Green Rider Siphe Mlawuli, in Parklands, Cape Town. Image by Barry Christianson for Mongabay.
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