Opinion
By Penelope Vasquez Hadjilyra
There is a kind of exhaustion in Cyprus that no statistic can capture. You wake up at six to beat traffic, work for a salary that barely covers the rent, and drive home on roads where traffic barely moves. Nothing is in your hands. In recent years, food delivery workers have been paying the price for this exhaustion.
Take housing. In the first quarter of 2026, 43.4% of property transactions involved foreign buyers, and the Central Bank admits that property prices have become disconnected from Cypriot salaries. Take traffic. In 2025, drivers in Nicosia lost 118 hours to rush-hour congestion. Some 95% of all trips are made by car because there is no real alternative. Then there is the state. Studies, “smart traffic lights,” deadlines that keep getting pushed back. Citizens learn that protesting changes nothing. This is what desperation looks like.
Desperation looks for someone it can control. It cannot stop an investor or challenge a ministry. But it can target a young man riding an electric bicycle. Delivery workers are usually students from South Asia or Africa. They work through contractors, intermediary companies that take a cut of their earnings, get paid per delivery, and pay for their own vehicles. They have no vote and are afraid to file complaints. Yet from behind the wheel of a car, they can look like the only people on the road who are free to do as they please.
By October 2024, 18 attacks had been recorded. In May 2026, masked men in Paphos attacked two delivery workers twice in a single night. In August, five delivery workers ended up in the hospital. Wolt says most of these attacks are racially motivated. The loot might be a phone or a few euros. But that is not the real point.
Many delivery workers do drive recklessly. Many electric bicycles are illegal. The law sets a speed limit of 25 kilometers per hour, but importers themselves report widespread tampering to get around these restrictions. During an inspection in Nicosia, 21 of 29 bicycles were confiscated. Drivers who follow the rules see others breaking them and get angry. But that anger is directed at the wrong person. Delivery workers do not import the bicycles, set delivery deadlines, or design roads without bike lanes. Their illegal behavior is a symptom of a state that has failed to do its job.
There are also whispers that some delivery workers are drug dealers. I cannot confirm that, although it may happen. But is that a reason to resort to violence? Drug trafficking is a matter for the Drug Law Enforcement Unit, not a gang of masked men. The rumor simply gives them another excuse.
Wealthy newcomers who drive up rents are called investors, and nobody throws eggs at them. Poor foreigners are called migrants. Nobody learned this distinction on the road. Studies in schools point to structural racism. In 2022, after a video emerged showing teenagers attacking delivery workers, the Commissioner for Administration approached the Ministry of Education and called for anti-racism education starting in elementary school.
For a few minutes, the person who knocks a delivery worker off his motorbike feels in control. The next morning, the rent is still the same, and traffic on the ring road is just as bad. He has taken nothing from anyone with real power. He has simply found someone with less.
The real questions need to be directed elsewhere. Why does the state have a plan to attract companies but no plan for where the people already living here are supposed to live? Why, after decades, is there still no public transportation system that offers a genuine alternative to driving? Why are delivery platforms not held responsible for their contractors or for the way people delivering on their behalf drive? Why does nobody inspect the bicycles being imported or check who removes their speed restrictions after they are sold, while the bicycles themselves are confiscated on the street? Why is there no registration or insurance system for micromobility, and no safe space on the road for people who are not inside cars? Why are delivery workers who are attacked afraid to report the violence? And above all, why is nobody addressing the root of the problem: the racism people learn at school?
The desperation felt by some members of society is real. But as long as nobody answers these questions, that desperation will continue to find an outlet wherever people think they can exert control. And racism will keep pointing them in the same wrong direction.
Penelope Vasquez Hadjilyra is an architect and a PhD candidate in architecture.
