Transportation

The Politics Clogging Transportation Reform in Egypt

An emphasis on building wide roads and highways bring the government a façade of prestige without benefiting average people.
Amr Nabil/AP

“Maybe there’s a protest,” said the taxi driver. I laughed at what today in Egypt had to be a joke. We were stuck in Cairo’s notorious traffic this January, bumper to bumper with no way out and seemingly no rhyme or reason to the delay. There was a time when near-daily demonstrations clogged these roads during the revolutionary heyday of 2011 to 2013. But then came the counter-revolutionary repression and the sidelining and stalling of many movements for change, including transit reform.

Today, Egypt has a heavy list of problems: Under General-turned-President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi the country is facing one of the worst political crackdowns and economic crises in its modern history. My lengthy taxi ride that day cost half of what it did three months earlier, when the government floated the Egyptian pound in November as part of negotiations for an International Monetary Fund loan, and local prices starting rising with little oversight. Much of the country’s 90 million people, one-fourth of whom live below the poverty line, depend on government subsidies for bread, fuel, and electricity—and they’re being hit hard.