It is a hot summer afternoon in Ramses Street in Downtown Cairo. On the right-hand side of the street a group of people are waving to passing buses and microbuses, at times rushing by.

When noticed by one of the drivers of these vehicles, the latter will stop abruptly at the side of the road, and the would-be passengers then have to rush to catch it before the driver gets impatient. They have to do so irrespective of ability, especially in the case of the elderly or women or men carrying children.

There is no bus stop. There was one once until the early 1990s. However, it then disappeared. There is no shaded zone for the waiting passengers. The pavement, largely taken up by street vendors, is also mostly zoned off by a green metal fence. People have to stand practically on the street in order to catch one of the Public Transport Organisation buses or a microbus run by a private company.

Nobody knows when their bus will come, not even approximately. There is no longer such a thing as a schedule, which was always very tentative anyway, at least during the past 40 years. People just have to stay focused on the vehicles rushing by.

Hala, a woman in her late 20s, is standing waiting for the microbus that will take her to Abbasiya, an east Cairo neighbourhood where she lives with her family. She is suffocating under the blazing sun and is anxious about the time. She needs to go home for a rest after having ended her shift as a sales assistant in a Downtown store before she leaves for another shift at another store in Heliopolis. Hala’s house is not close to the Abbasiya stop on the Underground Line 3, whose Downtown stop is next to the bus stop.

“It would be quite a long walk, especially in this heat, and I would have to take a tok-tok. A microbus is so much cheaper than the underground and the subsequent tok-tok fare,” Hala said. She explained that the air-conditioned underground, followed by a tok-tok, would cost her three times what she has to spend on the one-leg microbus ride.

“If I take the underground and a tok-tok to come to Downtown and to go back to Abbasiya and then to go to Heliopolis in the evening and back home, I would be spending a considerable part of my income on transportation. It would not make sense,” she said before waving down a microbus that had stopped not far from where she was standing.

She got on the microbus that seemed to have no vacant seat but was not very crowded. Judging by the fact that she had said she had already been waiting for about half an hour, she was relatively lucky with her ride back home. Other passengers, who seemed older and a lot more tired, said they had been waiting for their buses for longer, with none paying any attention to passing taxi-drivers who were deliberately slowing down to catch a possibly exhausted passenger who might have got too tired of waiting for the bus.

“Out of the question. Taxi-drivers have gone mad with their prices. They often don’t use the meter, and even if they do it would still be very expensive. I only use the public buses or microbuses,” said Zaher, a civil servant in his 30s.

Both Hala and Zaher were speaking prior to a new increase in the prices of tickets of public and private-run buses that occurred on 24 July along with an increase in the price of petrol. Overall, the new rates introduced a 20 per cent increase in the prices of most bus and microbus tickets. There was also a 10 per cent increase in the fares of taxis. Expectations have it that there will soon be an increase in the prices of underground tickets as well.

This is the second rise in the fares for public and private transportation this year. The first occurred in March. Today, an average bus ride, one way, costs LE8. Up until 2010, it would have cost LE1. The first significant increase came in 2017, with a 150 per cent increase. Since then, the prices of tickets have been systematically increasing, one result of the increasing prices of fuel that the government has adopted over the past eight years as part of its economic reform plans.

According to Moataz Mahrous, an urban researcher, 91 per cent of Egyptian families use public transport, given that only five per cent of families across Egypt have at least one private car. This percentage goes up to 11 per cent in Cairo.

In a chapter he contributed to a book that came out in 2023 on the issue of public transportation in Cairo, Mahrous said that in most cases it is buses, microbuses, and other affordable vehicles that people count on, irrespective of the comfort question. For some people, it is strictly buses that they use simply because they are a cheaper option. They also have fixed-price tickets, unlike microbuses.

Mahrous looks at the shortage of public buses in Cairo and the absence of basic levels of comfort in them. Many people cannot afford to use air-conditioned buses or non-air-conditioned taxis, much less smartphone applications for private taxis or shared rides.

He quotes statistics that indicate that in the 1960s, when Cairo had no more than five million inhabitants, it had around 4,700 public buses alongside the tram, trolley bus, Helwan tram and Heliopolis metro. By 2014, with the number of Cairo inhabitants almost quadrupling, the number of public buses has decreased by around one third, with many becoming too worn out to keep moving.

In 2013, a report issued by the World Bank indicated that the cost to Egypt of overcrowding could come to around $8 billion on an annual basis, Mahrous said. It recommended an expansion of the range and number of public transport buses, as one of the most effective and least costly means of transportation.

Introducing environmentally friendly buses that are operated by natural gas was also referred to in the report.

OVER OR UNDER

According to Mahrous, the government decided to opt for one of the more costly options to resolve the heavy traffic problems in Cairo, namely expanding the road network and increasing the number of flyovers.

Statistics from the Ministry of Transport indicate that the government has built over 900 flyovers during the past 10 years and is planning to build an equal number in the coming few years.

In statements made earlier this month, Kamel Al-Wazir, minister of transport and industry, said that without the flyovers and the new roads that the government has built during the past decade, there would have been an annual cost of $8 billion as a consequence of the traffic jams that Cairo would have been suffering from.

In parallel statements, Prime Minister Mustafa Madbouli said that the cost of the excess consumption of fuel as a result of more traffic jams could have reached $15 billion yearly, had it not been for the new roads and flyovers.

However, quoting Osama Okeil, a professor of planning at Cairo University, Mahrous said that the flyovers and expanded roads are not the way out of the acute traffic jams that the city is suffering from because they induce more people to own private cars. What the government should do, according to Okeil, is to expand and improve the public transport network. Today, he argued, the vast majority of cars in Cairo are privately owned.

Given the fact that the increase in the number of private cars is not equitably distributed across families in the city, Mahrous argued that irrespective of successes in improving traffic circulation, the issue of equality has been compromised. The fact remains that those who use their cars to get to residential compounds on the outskirts of the city have an easier time of things when compared to those stuck in crowded buses moving around the older neighbourhoods of the city.

Al-Wazir said that the government is planning to introduce a new line of buses that will be operating along the Cairo Ring Road, which encircles most of the city. The new buses, which will be environmentally friendly, will be part of an integrated scheme that will allow people to use any of the multiple transportation options, including the underground, the Light Rail Transit (LRT), and the monorail.

Mahrous’ article appears in a book titled Fi Ard Al-Tarik released earlier this year by Al-Maraya Publications. In the same book, Dalia Wahdan, an associate professor at the American University in Cairo School of Public Policy, argues that it is hard to separate the government scheme for transportation from a global trend of debt-based investment in infrastructure.

“This is nothing new, and it actually started in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis,” she wrote. She explained that this trend was introduced by international financial bodies that were willing to lend to governments that had plans for expanding infrastructure, with Egypt being one of them. Whether this was the best choice for Egypt or not is a different question, Wahdan argued.

For Marian, the mother of two children, none of the transport options fit. Speaking as she was riding with her two sons on Line 3 of the underground, she said that for “a mother who needs to take her children to their sports training sessions in the summer, their schools and private lessons in winter, and to do the shopping and essential errands like visiting parents and going to medical visits,” the idea of moving from one means of transportation to another is simply “inappropriate”.

 “First of all, it would take so much time, and secondly it would be expensive for the three of us to keep paying for all these tickets to move from one part of the city to another,” she said.

Usually, Marian said, it is her husband, who has a car, who drives the children around. To take the underground, as Marian and her two boys have to change lines, and then to take a taxi to the training centre where they do swimming and judo classes, would cost LE50 per leg. “We are talking about LE100 just to go to the training centre and to come back, and obviously this is not the only activity they do,” she said. “If I need a transportation budget of LE4,000 to LE5,000 a month, it does not make sense,” she added.

Many people like Marian calculate that the average monthly consumption of fuel for a family of four or five would be less than the public or private transportation bill for the same family. This is the case, given that any increase in the price of fuel is always coupled with an increase in the prices of tickets for buses and microbuses. After factoring in instalments on a private car and maintenance costs, for many it would still be more economical to use their own car than to count on public transport.

“At the end of the day, even an old car is a car one can count on,” Marian said.

CRASHING DOWN

Marian regrets having hesitated about taking her husband’s advice when they first got married to take driving lessons. “At the time, it was possible to buy a car on installments. Now the smallest car is very expensive,” she stated.

With the subsequent moves to devalue the Egyptian pound over the past eight years and the economic crisis of the past three years, the prices of cars have more than tripled, excluding a considerable segment of society from buying one. This includes people like Marian who would have had her first car had it not been for the prices.

It also includes Maher, Marian’s husband, who wanted to sell his old car and buy a new one. “This is the one car that our entire family is dependent on for almost everything. It is getting old, but to sell it and have a new car is very unlikely, not just because of the prices, but also because of the long wait that people have to go through to get new cars,” she said.

According to Egypt’s Auto Motive Information Council, there was a decline in the sales of cars during the first quarter of 2024 compared to the first quarter of 2023. However, according to Mohamed Abdel-Ati, a private loans advisor at one of the private-sector banks, the biggest segment of people seeking loans over the past four to five years has been made up of people trying to buy cars on installments.

“Whatever people may say, a private car is something that Egyptians value. It is something that most Egyptians would like to have. This might be a result of the lack of proper public transportation, or it might be a result of the lack of a public transportation culture — but whatever the case, a private car is a priority now for every family and for every working individual,” he said.

Manar, an executive who lives in a compound in the Fifth Settlement to the east of Cairo and works in the smart village to the west of the city, could not go back and forth to work if she did not have a car.

“A car is a must. Most people don’t live and work in the centre of the city or even in its immediate suburbs. Distances are greater now. Even though it would be unrealistic to think that everyone could afford a car, going from one bus to another or from the metro to a bus just to go to work and back home would be just too hectic,” she said.

“The new roads and the expanded lanes of the old roads have helped a great deal.”

However, as the authors of Fi Ard Al-Tarik note, in the absence of proper pedestrian crossing points and enforced regulations, there has been an increase in car accidents. In 2022, the number of people who suffered injuries during car accidents was estimated at 54 per 100,000, double the number in 2013, it says.

According to Walid Mansour, an urban researcher who contributed a chapter to the book, the number of lanes in some of the streets that have been expanded, especially in east Cairo, go beyond the human scale. In practical terms, Soheir, a resident of Heliopolis, said, this means that people sometimes find it hard to cross the street and stand a high risk of injury if they do so away from official crossings — “which are not very frequent and are not often operating”.

Getting older and slower in her movements, Soheir said that she has “just stopped trying to cross Al-Hegaz Street” that she lives on. “I walk to the nearest U-turn and take a taxi to get me to the other side, and then I walk a bit more. One needs to move a little. In Heliopolis, we were used to walking, but now we fear accidents.”

It was in 2015 that the government started a campaign to remove the Heliopolis tram and the pavements to its sides in order to widen the roads by increasing the number of lanes. This also happened in Nasr City, another east Cairo neighbourhood.

This has led to an almost total disregard by many drivers of the maximum 60 km per hour speed limit that is legally designated for residential areas. “Taxi-drivers love the new roads, and they say they have spared them many traffic jams. But we have a hard time if we need to walk from one point to another because we sometimes need to wait for more than 15 minutes to be able to cross the street,” said Jehan, a resident of Nasr City.

According to Shehab Abu Zeid of the Nada Foundation for Safer Egyptian Roads, a NGO, while the widened streets of east Cairo have possibly aggravated the number of car accidents, the problem has always been there for a range of reasons, including the poor observation of the speed limit in supposedly strictly residential zones.

It was the shocking death of Nada, a young girl who was hit by a car, that initiated the mission of the foundation that bears her name back in 2013. Since then, Abu Zeid explained, she has been trying to improve the level of awareness about safe roads and to lobby for stricter rules for trucks in the city. She also wants to see regular drug-testing of the drivers of taxis, buses, microbuses, or e-taxis. “This is a question that requires greater public awareness and regulations for sure,” Abu Zeid said.

The same demands that are being promoted by the Nada Foundation were endorsed in 2014 by the National Council for Safe Roads. However, according to Mansour, the basic regulations for safe roads, including pedestrian crossings and decent pavements, are still largely not enforced.

WALK AND CYCLE

Ahmed Osama, director of the Centre for Mobility, a think tank, and a professor of urban planning, argues that the whole issue of the high level of car accidents in Egypt and of transportation problems needs to be addressed with an eye on practices and not just regulations.

Egypt has a high level of transportation problems and road accidents. “While the government should work on the regulations related to speed limits, special zones for trucks, and the expansion of public transport, it should also promote other forms of mobility, including walking and cycling,” he said.

This is not a prescription that fits all of the city, but it is a formula that could be applied within some neighbourhoods or even across neighbourhoods provided that there were proper pavements and proper lanes for bicycles.

“Obviously, this does not match with the fact that some of the streets of the city have been turned into semi highways, due to the increased number of lanes that come with increased levels of speed,” he said. However, he argued that it is not too late to improve the quality of pavements and to allocate some of the lanes to bicycles.

In 2022, Downtown Cairo was fitted out with bicycle lanes for Cairo Bike, an ambitious project launched by Prime Minister Madbouli to encourage people to use bicycles around the city.

According to Ahmed Dorghami, a programme manager at UN Habitat, the scheme is compatible with the need of a highly polluted city like Cairo to reduce its level of emissions. He said that it was not just about easier mobility but also about less pollution. UN Habitat is a partner in the project.

With a smartphone application, 250 bikes for daily rental, and special lanes in Downtown Cairo, the first phase of Cairo Bike was launched in October 2022, just ahead of Egypt’s hosting of the UN COP28 Climate Conference in Sharm El-Sheikh.

The project had been under consideration and planning since 2016 and was expected to expand fast to cover the city with 70,000 bikes. However, despite a promising start, it did not turn out as hoped.

One of the key problems related to the fact that the bikes were rented by delivery services that were supposed to provide their own bikes. The project was suspended for close to a year before it was re-initiated towards the end of last year with higher fees and a new management system.

However, despite official statements, the second phase of the project that was supposed to cover parts of west and east Cairo and was scheduled for launch in the spring of this year is still suspended.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 1 August, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly