The City asked residents to gather objective evidence. Residents did. Then the follow-ups went unanswered.
- Environmental Health said anecdotal complaints were not enough and asked residents to make contact again once they had gathered sufficient evidence.
- Residents built a monitoring platform that records every detected delivery motorcycle and shows traffic volumes, daily patterns, hourly activity, and historical trends.
- The evidence was shared with the City. Three follow-up emails over two weeks have received no response.
- If objective evidence is the requirement, residents are entitled to know what standard of evidence is finally sufficient.
Date: 19 July 2026
One of the first things the City of Cape Town told us was that anecdotal complaints weren't enough.
They were right.
If residents expect the City to investigate a noise nuisance, there needs to be objective evidence. That's why Environmental Health visited the property, explained the challenges of measuring intermittent motorcycle noise, and asked us to make contact again once we had gathered sufficient evidence.
So that's exactly what we did.
Over the past several weeks we built a monitoring platform that records every detected delivery motorcycle passing our street. The result is a transparent, continuously updated evidence base showing traffic volumes, daily patterns, hourly activity and historical trends. It removes opinion from the discussion and replaces it with measurable facts.
That evidence has now been shared with the City.
Since submitting it, we have sent three follow-up emails over a two-week period requesting the next step in the investigation. At the time of writing, we have received no response.
This raises an important question. If residents are told that objective evidence is required before a noise nuisance can be investigated, what happens when that evidence is provided?
How much evidence is enough?
What standard of evidence is sufficient?
The purpose of this campaign has never been to prove that these motorcycles are illegal. Checkers has said its bikes are roadworthy and compliant with the applicable standards, and that may well be true. But compliant is not the same as acceptable. Bikes as loud as these BigBoy Velocity models have been allowed into the country and onto residential streets precisely because meaningful noise standards have never been properly defined or enforced at a national level. Our concern is different: the repeated routing of a large volume of commercial motorcycle traffic through a quiet residential street, creating a persistent and avoidable nuisance for the people who live here.
The City's own regulations recognise that a noise nuisance is not simply about decibel levels. Frequency, repetition, locality and impact all matter. Those are precisely the factors our evidence has been designed to document.
Residents are entitled to expect more than being told to gather evidence. They are entitled to know how that evidence will be assessed, what the next steps are, and whether the City's own by-laws will be meaningfully enforced.
If weeks of objective monitoring, documented patterns and repeated follow-up are still not enough to move an investigation forward, then the City owes residents a clear answer: what standard of evidence is sufficient?
Until that question is answered, asking residents to collect objective evidence risks becoming a process without an outcome.