From the Tour d'Afrique website - The Social Effects of Motorized Transport

The United States puts between 25 and 45 per cent of its total energy into vehicles: to make them, run them, and clear a right of way for them when they roll, when they fly, and when they park. For the sole purpose of transporting people, 250 million Americans allocate more fuel than is used by 1.3 billion Chinese and Indians for all purposes.

The model American male devotes more than 1,600 hours a year to his car. He sits in it while it goes and while it stands idling. He parks it and searches for it. He earns the money to put down on it and to meet the monthly installments. He works to pay for gasoline, tolls, insurance, taxes, and tickets. He spends four of his sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering his resources for it. And this figure does not take into account the time consumed by other activities dictated by transport: time spent in hospitals, traffic courts, and garages; time spent watching automobile commercials or attending consumer education meetings to improve the quality of the next buy.

The model American puts in 1,600 hours to get 7,500 miles: less than five miles per hour. In countries deprived of a transportation industry, people manage to do the same, walking wherever they want to go, and they allocate only 3 to 8 per cent of their society's time budget to traffic instead of 28 per cent. What distinguishes the traffic in rich countries from the traffic in poor countries is not more mileage per hour of life-time for the majority, but more hours of compulsory consumption of high doses of energy, packaged and unequally distributed by the transportation industry. Energy and Equity. by Ivan Illich: Toward a History of Needs.

Motor vehicle transport usage is rising steadily throughout the developing world, and creating even higher levels of energy consumption and CO2 emissions. Global passenger car production reached a record 39 million vehicles in the year 2000, rising three percent in 1999.

Car use in Third World cities is very regressive: It absorbs massive public investments for road infrastructure building and maintenance, taking resources away from the more urgent and important needs of the poor; creates jams that hinder the mobility of the bus riding majorities; pollutes the air; makes noise; road arteries primarily for private vehicle users become obstacles to lower income pedestrians; it leads to a progressive invasion of scarce pedestrian spaces by parked vehicles.

There clearly are contradictory interests between motor vehicles and human beings: The more a city is made to accommodate motor vehicles, the less respectful of human dignity it becomes; and the more acute the differences in quality of life between upper income and lower income groups. Children, the old, handicapped and vulnerable populations are particularly alienated by increasing motorization and the processes that come with it. Enrique Penalosa, former mayor of Bogota

While automobiles may be the vehicle of choice for a limited circle of affluent, bicycles continue to be the primary means of transport for millions of people, the world over. The WorldWatch Institute estimates that 20 percent of the world's population can afford cars, while 80 percent of the world population can afford bicycles. Yet with the exception of far-sighted cities like Bogota, bicycles are increasingly being pushed to the margins of transport policy in developing countries, even in China, where bicycle travel is the most intensive in the world. In many developing countries, motor vehicles typically account for more than 40 percent of energy consumption, creating a huge drain on foreign currency. (World Resources, 1992-93).

The Tour d'Afrique, by promoting bicycle travel as a high-status mode of travel, will help raise awareness of the crucial importance of bicycle travel as a part of transport, environmental and social policy planning, not only in the media, but also among policymakers and residents of the continent and around the world.