Car-Created Congestion Cries Out for Correcting

By James J. Napoli

There's a story—probably apocryphal—about two Japanese engineers who were hired as consultants by the Egyptian government to analyze the traffic system in Cairo and to propose methods to improve it.

After much research, they issued their findings and recommendation: "There is no system and it can't be improved."

The point of the anecdote would be obvious to anyone who has ever been to Cairo, a city of around 16 million people and 1.2 million cars that negotiate through skintight alleys, chaotic squares and roads crammed with vehicles driven, in the main, by lunatics. Or are they lunatics?

Like the Japanese engineers, most Egyptians concluded long ago that if anyone tried to impose a system on the city's traffic, then nothing would move. The traffic would be orderly, but in a condition of stasis if drivers actually stopped at red lights, stayed within their lanes, stuck to the right side of the road, stopped whizzing around slower cars, didn't cut blindly in front of oncoming cars, braked for pedestrians and obeyed the signals from the army of traffic policemen who are now diligently ignored by everyone.

Inventive Disorder

The time has apparently come, however, when even the inventive disorder of Cairo's traffic—a popular metaphor for the way things work generally in Egypt—can't keep things moving. There are just too many cars. The city's running out of space to park them, much less move them. Even the unofficial car parkers who line up cars two or three abreast along "their" streets seem overwhelmed by the sheer numbers.

About 5,000 new cars are added to Cairo's fleet every month, but only a fraction of that number—50 percent at most—are retired at the same time. That means that Cairo's already constipated streets must ingest at least an additional 30,000 cars every year.

Egyptians simply don't like to get rid of their cars, which can be held together indefinitely with variations on bailing wire and duct tape. One estimate is that about 65 percent of the cars in Cairo are over 10 years old and 24 percent are over 25 years old.

Even taxi cabs well past their prime—with windows that don't shut, doors that don't open from the inside, seats that settle you close to the road, and floors that provide a view of the pavement—continue to ply the streets, more slowly now, but unimpeded by the law.

Traffic flow is pinched to a dribble during most hours of the day and much of the night. Drivers of cars tightly wedged in traffic frequently can't even make way for police cars and ambulances—that is, asssuming they they would want to make way for them. It doesn't help that ordinary citizens in Cairo have taken to blasting official-sounding sirens to help them make progress through the congestion ahead.

"There is no system and it can't be improved."

Government is finally getting concerned. An alarmed Governors' Council in January adopted several modest measures, such as added traffic patrols and parking lots, to begin to loosen the snarls. Perhaps more signficantly, the governors of Cairo, Giza and Alexandria were requested to come up with radical solutions to the mess.

In fact, the Interior Ministry recently sent up what appears to be a trial balloon, calling for alternating traffic days for cars with odd- and even-numbered license plates, as has been tried in cities like Paris and Athens.

Most local commentators aren't confident that such a plan would work here, where many traffic police are illiterate and would not be disposed to enforce this law when they pay no attention whatever to enforcement of so many other traffic laws, including a decades-old ban on unnecessary honking of horns.

Maybe it's worth a try anyway. As one American consultant told the Washington Report, "The city is unlivable now because of the bloody cars."

But there are other alternatives, some of them already being tried.

Dependence on cars could be less critical in the future as work on extensions for the underground metro system continues. And the government recently announced that Cairo's public transportation system will get an additional 688 minibuses over the next year. It also announced that the city's biggest taxi and bus stations will be moved to the city outskirts, which should relieve some traffic pressure points.

Another option is through Egypt's tough 1994 environmental law, whose four-year grace period ends March 1. Theoretically, at least, cars will have to go through auto emissions inspections to renew their registrations after that date.

Of course, it will probably be two years before the infrastructure for actually testing vehicles is in place. When it is, however, the government would have another mechanism to begin to take a percentage of the cars off the road and reduce the pressure on traffic, a side benefit of the law whose real intent is to clean up the air.

Environmental Impacts

The growing number of vehicles has turned Cairo into a city with some of the dirtiest air in the world, with emissions that have been blamed for a variety of lung diseases, miscarriages and psychological maladies, including depression and inability to concentrate.

Emissions were even dirtier before November 1996, when the government, without prior warning to the public, suddenly banned leaded gasoline, which has dire health effects, particularly on children.

The ban on leaded gas might help reduce the number of cars on the road since the lead-free gas could result in higher maintenance costs, particularly for older vehicles. Some drivers are also complaining that the new gasoline—which has a different additive, called methyl tertiary butyl ether, or MTBE, to replace the lead—burns more quickly and makes their engines run rougher. But officials say such charges—as well as suspicions about MTBE's health effects—are unproven.

In any case, to clean up all the exhaust emissions would require catalytic converters, which at the moment are not available in Egypt. When they are available—as they presumably will be—they will up the price of a new car by about 1,200 Egyptian pounds ($350).

That's a lot, but will it be enough to discourage someone from buying who can already afford a new car? Probably not. Would people be discouraged by being forced to pay more taxes for using their cars? Probably not many.

No single proposal would do the trick and no solution is without a downside.

Maybe a variety of approaches will have to be adopted simultaneously to reduce the number of vehicles on Cairo's streets significantly. But it no longer seems possible to take the Japanese consultants' advice.

Although there may be no system, it has to be improved.

James J. Napoli teaches journalism at the American University in Cairo.