The DA-led City demanded evidence. Now it ignores residents.

Date: 19 August 2026

Scope note: this article records the responses and non-responses received from public bodies and an elected representative. It expresses residents' political opinion, but does not make a court's legal finding.

The DA-led City of Cape Town has failed residents. Completely.

For more than 18 months, residents have complained about repeated Checkers Sixty60 motorcycles using a residential street as a shortcut. Environmental Health said anecdotal complaints were not enough, so I built and maintain an evidence platform documenting every detected pass, daily patterns and the scale of the problem.

The City received the evidence it asked for. It then said traffic noise on a public road fell outside Environmental Health's enforcement route. Traffic Services said the bikes were legal. Transport Management said the road was open to traffic. Nobody accepted responsibility for the cumulative commercial routing impact.

Now the emails asking who can act are simply going unanswered. That is a pathetic standard of local government.

Show residents the supposed loophole

I have not been shown the provision that supposedly creates a blanket exclusion for this complaint.

The City's own guidance says the National Road Traffic Act controls road-traffic noise. That still does not answer the practical question residents have repeatedly asked: which authority will act on this documented pattern?

Perhaps the City has a legal interpretation supporting its position. If so, publish it and identify the authority that must act. If there is a genuine loophole, the DA governs the City and should work to close it. Repeating “the bikes are legal” while every department walks away is not an answer.

The evidence is not marginal. Across 14 trusted days after Checkers' 3 July routing promise, residents recorded an average of 137 camera-proven and ≈202 estimated passes per day. Individual bikes being road legal does not answer what repeated, avoidable commercial routing does to the same homes all day.

Gerhard Fourie's response record: zero direct replies

Gerhard Fourie is the DA councillor for Ward 103. He has never personally replied to this complaint.

His secretary initially forwarded my email to Environmental Health. That was it. No direct reply from the councillor. No meeting. No explanation of the law. No intervention communicated to residents. After Environmental Health closed its door, the later emails asking what happens next have been ignored.

I asked a blunt question: if I bought a motorcycle producing the same kind of noise and rode it past an official's or councillor's home roughly 200 times a day, would the City really claim it could do nothing?

That is a test of their position, not a proposal to do it. The question remains unanswered.

Forwarding one email is not representation. Leaving every later question unanswered is not representation. On this documented issue, residents have received nothing meaningful from the ward councillor.

This failure belongs to the DA

The DA governs Cape Town. It cannot claim credit for the municipality when things work and hide behind departmental boundaries when residents expose a failure.

This is an administrative failure, an enforcement failure and a political failure. Residents did the work. Residents supplied the evidence. The person who built the public evidence platform is now being ignored by the municipality and the elected councillor who is supposed to represent the ward.

The City and Gerhard Fourie must now provide:

• A direct written response, not another silent forward.
• The exact legal provision relied on to exclude this complaint.
• The name of the authority responsible for the cumulative commercial routing impact.
• A review and measured trial of the mapped main-road alternative.

Until they do, the public record is simple: the DA-led City demanded evidence, received it, failed to act and then ignored the residents who supplied it.