Biking Acculturation Incidence on the Cameroon Urban Activity Fluxes: A Traffic Congestion Panacea or Palliative in Bamenda?

Abstract

City activity fluxes are reminiscent of stakeholder mobility in the urban sphere service and functions. Such mobility affects income and work assiduity though often creating accidents, material damage and pollution of varied forms of urban transportation that has lately witnessed the adaption to motorbikes as an alternatively favoured means of movement to that car. Salvaging economic depression and affordability has given biking an edge of success of recent which raises the recurrent question of its spatio-temporal and technical sustainability in in the freight sector. This paper evaluates the commercialisation of bike riding despite levied negativism perceptions in providing an alternative to the major urban problem of traffic congestion and its contribution to peter the pitfalls of the congestion. To assess the urban congestion intensity, traffic flow count was conducted during the rainy and dry season of spatio-temporal of vehicles (from the city centre to the suburbs). Findings agree to the fact that vehicular traffic congestion with increasing number of bikes was found to be higher along the N-E than the N-W road axis in direct conformity with sampled urban congestion triggers for Bamenda related to road infrastructural traits and vehicular numbers. Though motor bikes initially were a panacea, the sum effect of congestion reveals the urgent need for urban mass transport systems that should be complemented by a holistic urban transport governance involving the creation of deviation routes and enforcing traffic congestion rules.