Drowning in bodas

 So...the primary mode of transportation here in Kampala is not cars or buses, but motorcycles. These are known as "bodas." Sometime back (I don't know when), East Africa got the brilliant idea to import bodas mostly from India and they came to be all the craze. Because if you can ride a bicycle, you can ride a boda, is the thinking. And bodas proved to be the answer to the unemployment problem especially among young people. All you had to do was get one (registered or not), and solicit riders for hire (again, whether or not you have a license). Now more than 90% of bodas in Uganda are used for income purposes. 

So, now Kampala is drowning in bodas, millions of them. Though there are traffic laws--the usual ones that apply to cars--as well as laws about wearing helmets and not allowing more than one passenger, mostly these are disregarded.

The fact is that Kampala has major traffic jams, and so if you take a minibus (known as a "taxi," not to be confused with a taxicab, which is called a "private taxi"), you could potentially sit in it at your point of origin for up to a half hour while the driver waits for it to fill up with passengers--14 in a standard taxi. Then, you will undoubtedly get stuck in a traffic jam, sometimes not moving for 10-15 minutes or more in the worst cases. In my case, to get to the center of town could take me an hour in a taxi, even though it is not even 3 miles.

But on a boda, I can get to town in 15-20 minutes. The downside is that the boda drivers weave in and out of traffic, sometimes make turns too close for comfort, run red lights when they see no cars coming, etc. The versatility of the boda becomes a liability when it has to share the road with cars, trucks, and buses. And the fact that Uganda drivers use the left-hand side of the road makes it challenging for a Westerner. It can be easy as a pedestrian to get creamed if you look the wrong way on the road you're crossing. (Come to think of it, you really have to look both ways because there is always that wrong-way driver.) 

There is one saving grace, however. A company called SafeBoda started a number of years ago to provide relatively "safe" rides using drivers that have been trained on road safety, laws, etc. These drivers are supposed to provide the passenger with a helmet, not just for themselves. The beauty of the arrangement is that you can order a SafeBoda ride using an app, which figures the approximate fixed cost of the ride (so you don't have to haggle with the driver), and if you deposit money into the app, you can basically ride cashless. You can also rate the driver afterward with one to five stars, so the driver has some incentive to give you good service.

One problem is that many of these drivers don't have Internet data on their phone. Somehow they know where to pick you up, but when it comes to where to take you, sometimes they are clueless. I still have to direct drivers to my destination point, unless it's a fairly well-known landmark. Another problem, I have been told, is that over the years the SafeBoda drivers have become lax in their driving habits, so that when you're sitting with 50 other bodas (no exaggeration) at a red traffic light, most of them may try to cross anyway, giving your driver that temptation to "follow the crowd." If he does, he gets one star knocked off my rating...

But at least I have that helmet! (Though I put it over my hat because the lack of a hairnet means who knows what lurks inside that helmet.)

So, let's face it: taking a boda is almost unavoidable. And every time I do, my heart is in my mouth. Especially after watching these YouTube videos of Uganda boda accidents captured by police cameras....