Urban Transport in the OIC Megacities
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Lack of facilities for pedestrians - There is a lack of appropriately designated, safe and well
maintained pedestrian facilities throughout the metropolitan area. Commensurate with the lack of
appropriate crossings, pedestrians are seen to be crossing streets at inappropriate locations and
mingling with moving motor vehicle traffic. Moreover there are many locations where footways are
blocked by signs, kiosks, construction debris, and parked cars.
Inadequate junction designs - Most road junctions in Cairo were designed when the numbers of
cars and other vehicles were much lower. Simple junction designs that are suitable for low numbers
of vehicles do not work well when the numbers increase to those currently experienced. Whether
through lack of funding or traffic engineering skills, junction design has failed to change with the
changing needs, so that most congestion results not from a lack of road capacity but a lack of junction
capacity.
Lack of bus stops: One of the most common complaints against mini-bus operators is their stopping
wherever a passenger wants to enter or leave the vehicle, with little no consideration of the impact of
the informal stop on the flow of other vehicles. Other cities have found that the location of bus stops
that provide information on the route numbers served and the places served by those routes,
combined with the enforcement of their use, not only reduces impediments to the overall traffic flow,
but makes the bus services more attractive to the users and more profitable to the operators.
Lack of facilities for and management of car parking: Among the greatest impediments to
pedestrian movement are cars parked on footways, and so closely parked at the sides of roads that
there is no space for pedestrians to cross the roads. Cars parked in inconvenient locations are also an
impediment to vehicle flows and significantly reduce road capacity available for traffic. One of the
reasons that cars are parked on footways and on roadways where they impede traffic is that there are
few other options available.
Bus priority facilities: As in many other developing cities, initial attempts at measures to give buses
priority in street and intersection capacity have not been successful. In part this is because they were
not well designed, in part because other complementary measures were not taken, but most
importantly, because their observance by other road users was not enforced.
Poor public passenger transport system: Cairo relies on under developed, overcrowded and
unreliable passenger transport services. The main positive characteristic of these services is their low
fares. However, for those services that are still operated by the public sector, this results in
unsustainable subsidies, and for private services that try to compete with the heavily subsidised public
services, the resulting fares are commercially unsustainable. The most obvious outcome is inadequate
public transport supply and deteriorating service quality. Public buses are poorly maintained and
many are out of service, while private operators are restricted to small and aging vehicles without the
means to replace them. The large number of operators and the previous lack of an institutional
framework to properly manage and regulate the system have led to a lack of integration among
passenger transport modes, rapid development of very low quality and unsafe supply, making already
unpleasant travelling conditions worse than they need be.
A high accident rate: The road transport death rate in Cairo is very high. Over 1,000 people die each
year inmotor vehicle accidents in GCR, more than half of thempedestrians, and over 4,000 are injured.
Except Teheran, these rates are by far higher than what has been recorded in other mega cities of the
world (World Bank, 2006).
Air and noise pollution: Mobile source air pollution in Cairo is serious both with regard to
particulate matter as well as noxious chemicals. Noise levels are high and aggravated by very old large
proportion of the car and taxi fleet. Vehicle inspections that should limit exhaust gas pollution are
mostly ineffective (World Bank 2006).