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06-11-09, 05:17 PM
Let me start with a couple thoughts on car free bicycling in Haiti. Almost all Haitians are car free in the sense that they do not own or operate a car for non-business purposes, but the car free bicyclist has become something of an anomaly, at least in the area I stayed in this past month in Haiti (near Darbonne and Leogane).
Bicycles in Haiti are mostly leftovers from the United States, it appears - bicycles originally sold at Wal-Mart or another big box store, (brands like huffy, mongoose, etc; parts that are clearly of the quality level you expect at cheap walmart bikes).
It's really cheap to have an experienced bike mechanic fix your bike in Haiti. And by Haitian standards ve bikes and parts at the quality level of your typical USA Local-Bike-Shop type bike are extremely expensive. So it makes economic sense to use the lower quality brand bikes there. The heavy wheels and tires of these cheap offroad bikes are actually pretty well suited to the poor quality unpaved roads that are found throughout the country. Speed tends not to be a priority (people who want to go fast shell out the cash for a motorcycle if they can afford it) so the heavy and fairly durable frames are certainly acceptable. On rural roads at slow speeds, brakes are a luxury rather than a necessity, which is lucky because keeping those lame low end side pull caliper brakes working at all is hard, and keeping them working well is pretty much impossible. It appeared to me that most of the bikes there had derailer shifting that actually worked (at least sort of, you might have to kick the derailer!) but I never saw anybody shift gears. A couple people had removed the derailers and shortened the chain to go singlespeed. (I'd be kind of inclined to go that route to save on maintenance.)
For safety, if I were biking in Haiti I would much prefer to have a front brake with good stopping power, but if I couldn't afford working brakes I'd just do like everybody else, and ride carefully at speeds no higher than 7mph.
In the area where I stayed, something like 1 in 2000 people had a private motor vehicle. Probably 1 in 500 owned a motor vehicle that was used as a privately owned "bus" (these are actually usually small pickup trucks that are slightly modified, so that they can carry up to 16 people crammed in the back plus 4 in the cab). Something like 2% of the population owns motorcycles, and most of those are used as moto-taxis, squishing up to 5 people on to a fairly small motorcycle at one time. Motor transportation is common for all but the poorest people in that area, but it's in these forms that are extremely low cost by first-world standards and use very little fuel per-passenger-mile. And yes, the vehicles use don't have any of the expensive eco-technology that's seen on modern vehicles in developed countries, so they're not nearly as environmentally benign as we'd like them to be. Given the economic circumstances, blaming Haitians is probably not going to do any good but I'm sure there are a lot of possibilities for helping the situation if we want to. Anybody interested?
Bicycles in Haiti are mostly leftovers from the United States, it appears - bicycles originally sold at Wal-Mart or another big box store, (brands like huffy, mongoose, etc; parts that are clearly of the quality level you expect at cheap walmart bikes).
It's really cheap to have an experienced bike mechanic fix your bike in Haiti. And by Haitian standards ve bikes and parts at the quality level of your typical USA Local-Bike-Shop type bike are extremely expensive. So it makes economic sense to use the lower quality brand bikes there. The heavy wheels and tires of these cheap offroad bikes are actually pretty well suited to the poor quality unpaved roads that are found throughout the country. Speed tends not to be a priority (people who want to go fast shell out the cash for a motorcycle if they can afford it) so the heavy and fairly durable frames are certainly acceptable. On rural roads at slow speeds, brakes are a luxury rather than a necessity, which is lucky because keeping those lame low end side pull caliper brakes working at all is hard, and keeping them working well is pretty much impossible. It appeared to me that most of the bikes there had derailer shifting that actually worked (at least sort of, you might have to kick the derailer!) but I never saw anybody shift gears. A couple people had removed the derailers and shortened the chain to go singlespeed. (I'd be kind of inclined to go that route to save on maintenance.)
For safety, if I were biking in Haiti I would much prefer to have a front brake with good stopping power, but if I couldn't afford working brakes I'd just do like everybody else, and ride carefully at speeds no higher than 7mph.
In the area where I stayed, something like 1 in 2000 people had a private motor vehicle. Probably 1 in 500 owned a motor vehicle that was used as a privately owned "bus" (these are actually usually small pickup trucks that are slightly modified, so that they can carry up to 16 people crammed in the back plus 4 in the cab). Something like 2% of the population owns motorcycles, and most of those are used as moto-taxis, squishing up to 5 people on to a fairly small motorcycle at one time. Motor transportation is common for all but the poorest people in that area, but it's in these forms that are extremely low cost by first-world standards and use very little fuel per-passenger-mile. And yes, the vehicles use don't have any of the expensive eco-technology that's seen on modern vehicles in developed countries, so they're not nearly as environmentally benign as we'd like them to be. Given the economic circumstances, blaming Haitians is probably not going to do any good but I'm sure there are a lot of possibilities for helping the situation if we want to. Anybody interested?