Cairo Train runs with no passengers

On the platform at the first station of the Light Rail Transit (LRT) line, Transport Minister Kamel El-Wazir is standing next to President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi and talking about the new service and its main departure station: “This electric train is the seventh mode of transport departing from Adly Mansour Station, and the fourth electrically powered one.” This is the station the government says is the largest in the Middle East, and which the international magazine ENR awarded the prize for best transport project in the world in 2022.

The minister adds: “This new train aims to carry a million people a day and will save 1.7 billion pounds ($90m based on the average exchange rate at the time of 18.9 pounds to the dollar) in fuel costs a year.”

Over a year after the Egyptian capital newest train entered service, it still sparks controversy from time to time. This was especially the case over the government’s repeated borrowing to complete the remaining three phases of the project, and the limited interest people showed in taking the train to travel between the cities of eastern Cairo, which the government put down to a temporary reluctance. Contrary to reports in the press that the train’s losses in its first year were about 25 million Egyptian pounds ($814,000 according to the 2023 exchange rate of 30.7 pounds to the dollar), the government denies there have been any operating losses at all.

Of the total budget of US$ 1.3 billion, the Egyptian government borrowed $1.2 billion from China, at an interest rate of 1.8 percent. The National Authority for Tunnels (NAT), which is part of the Ministry of Transport, completed the implementation and operation of the first and second phase of the Capital Train, which serves nine cities east of Cairo.

The LRT - the Capital Train - runs through the centre of the New Administrative Capital (with three stations in the capital: two stations currently operating and a third still under construction) which houses about 1.200 families. The state has set an ambitious target for its population to exceed six million by 2050.

The train also runs through the sprawling outskirts of the other eight cities, whose population exceeds 528,000. Tens of thousands of residents of the Delta governorates - especially Sharqia, Qalyubia, Cairo and Giza - flock to these cities each day, due to the urban expansion and the commercial and industrial areas located there, as well as private and state universities, which are headquartered or have branches east of Cairo.

Between the late 1970s and the end of the 2010s, new cities were established in the land east of Cairo. These account for the greatest urban expansion and population growth of all the new cities in the Greater Cairo region, according to studies by the Talaat Moustafa Group, the most prominent property developer in this area. The population of the cities east of Cairo is expected to reach ten million by 2030.

A thousand passengers used the LRT/Capital Train on its first six days in operation, at an average of 115 passengers a day, according to the Veto newspaper. These figures were not denied by either the NAT, the Ministry of Transport, or the French company managing the operation of the LRT, even though all three had said that the train could carry a million passengers a day.

During the LRT’s first three months in operation, images and videos circulating on news sites and social media platforms showed that passengers were reluctant to use it. The government always responded with denials or justifications along the lines of “lack of passengers is a temporary phenomenon” and will pass once all government employees are transferred to the Administrative Capital, or once the third and fourth phases of the LRT project is completed.

The transport minister at the time (and also the former governor of Cairo), Galal Al-Saeed, was prompted to write to “critics of the LRT” asking them to keep calm and claiming that low passenger numbers on the first days of the train’s operation had “given rise to a systematic campaign to undermine the project and its feasibility”.

Al-Saeed explained that the capacity of that part of the LRT in operation (70 kilometres) was between 15 and 25 thousand passengers per hour. He admitted that the project had not seen the expected initial passenger numbers, but was optimistic that these would increase within a few months.

A report on “Al-Manassah” news website revealed that the operating cost of a single train journey from Adly Mansour Station to the Administrative Capital, was 140,000 Egyptian pounds ($4,560 based on the average 2023 exchange rate), of which only 5,000 went to the NAT.

The Egyptian Ministry of Transport subsequently denied in an official statement, that any losses had been incurred. The statement merely referred to the contract the ministry had made with French company RATP to manage and operate the LRT, in return for a percentage of the revenue, without revealing the level of profits or losses made by the service. It maintained that the project would make sufficient profit in 20 years to at least recover the value of initial investment, without giving any information or figures for revenue or number of passengers.

Given that the Ministry of Transport continues to keep figures for LRT revenue and operation under wraps, there is a constant flow of news stories attributed to anonymous sources within the ministry. The most famous of these was a story headlined: “Ministry of Transport considering selling LRT assets to repay loans taken out for its implementation.” The Ministry of Transport denied this in an official statement, which was however nothing more than a general and broad clarification that the ministry was considering setting up a “partnership”, but had not offered for sale either the high-speed or light-weight rail service.

Because of the scarcity of available information, and because information from the Ministry of Transport is limited to generalities, with no details or precise data, we resolved to carry out a practical experiment in the cities through which the train runs, to find out what is actually happening on the ground.

We started off at the cities of Shorouk and Badr, which are two of the oldest and most important cities of eastern Cairo, as well as being the most densely populated urban areas on the LRT line. The train service reached them when its first and second phases were opened.

As well as the LRT, three other modes of transport link the cities of Badr and Shorouk - “microbus” taxis, and buses belonging to a private company “Mwasalat Misr”, and by the government-controlled Cairo Transport Authority. Each of these services has different routes.

When the LRT has begun operating, the countdown began "to save 1.7 billion pounds (about $90m based on July 2022 exchange rate of 18.9 pounds to the dollar) in fuel costs annually" - the secondary target which Minister of Transport Kamel Al-Wazir set for the project at its opening. The minister said at the time that achieving this goal would come through reducing the use of alternative means of transport - private cars, public buses, and taxis - which both new and established residents of the new cities use to travel along the same route as the train.

But what has actually happened, a year and ten months on, is the complete opposite of this declared goal. The use of other means of transport has actually gone up, based on the timetables we have seen for buses in Shorouk City run by Mwasalat Misr. According to the latest update on its website in 2021, the company was carrying 200,000 passengers per month to and from Shorouk before the LRT began running. They ran on six routes (three external and three internal) operating dozens of services 18 hours a day.

Of the three external routes, one goes from Shorouk City, which lies east of the Greater Cairo region, to downtown Cairo. The first bus (NS5) runs from central Shorouk to Abbassiya Square, and the second (NS7) from Shorouk to the Saray El-Kobba area, specifically to outside the metro station which is named after the first line.

When the LRT began operating in July 2022, there were 24 services over 16 hours on the Abbassiya bus route, according to the company’s timetables. But after the train had been running for a year and ten months, the number of daily bus services on the same route had risen to 27 over the same 16-hour period.

The number of services on the Saray El Kobba route also had increased to 25 from 24 a day in August 2022.

Shared taxis (microbuses), which take passengers from Shorouk City to stop number 10 in El Salam City in Cairo (the same route as LRT), are still operating 24 hours a day and have seen no significant reduction in numbers, according to one of the drivers of these taxis, which run from Shorouk to El Salam, east of Cairo, and back. The driver explained that there are fewer taxis between 2.00am and early morning, as is normal. But during peak hours, passengers crowd round the stand waiting for taxis to take them to their destination. And the rest of the day there are always taxis, according to the driver. And this was confirmed by one of the city’s residents.

The route for taxis (microbuses), is the same as for LRT. But the difference between them is that the taxi stand is in the centre of Shorouk City, which covers 16,000 acres, while the LRT station is on the outskirts - on the Cairo-Ismailia desert road, six kilometres from the city centre. The nearest residential area to the LRT is two kilometres away, and this is an area of ​​luxury villas whose residents use their own cars to get around.

Another point to note is that the fare for the microbus is about eight pounds - less than the price of a train ticket, which is around ten pounds, after it was temporarily reduced by up to 40 percent to attract more passengers. What is more, the bus fare to get from the city centre to the train station is six pounds.

We crossed the city and documented, with photos and video, people waiting in long queues during peak hours at the taxi stand on the Suez-Cairo desert road for transport to the El-Salam area east of Cairo (the same route as the Capital Train) or to Al-Munib, south of Giza, or the Mostorod area, between the Cairo and Qalyubia governorates.

We then took a trip on the LRT to monitor passenger traffic during peak times. The train left Adly Mansour, the first station on the line, at 3.00pm, after a wait of 15 minutes. There were only a few people in the station and most of the seats on the train were empty.

After the train had called at two stations, we noticed that there were no more than ten passengers, so we decided to get off at the third and fourth stops - Shorouk and Capital Gardens – where it was much the same story. At Shorouk station, the staff - security personnel, ticket office and service staff - outnumbered the passengers. The only ones we saw were the two who got off the train with us and a third person who came into the station as we were leaving. And there we saw the bus that takes train passengers to the city centre, which was the only one in the car park outside the station. We took the bus, which seats 26, from there to the Dar Misr housing project. The ticket cost six Egyptian pounds and we were the only ones on the bus.

Outside the second station, Capital Gardens, there were two buses to take LRT passengers into the city and back. We took one of them, along with four others who lived in the social housing units in this newly constructed city. The bus took us along several city streets, and on the way we saw no local means of transport, not even private cars. Although social housing blocks are well planned, designed and landscaped, the occupancy rate of these units is low.

Mohsen Mohamed (not his real name), a resident of one of these social housing blocks, lists two reasons for being reluctant to use the LRT. The first is the high price of a ticket - 15 Egyptian pounds ($0.32, based on the current average exchange rate of 47 pounds to the dollar) - compared to other means of transport, whether shared taxis or Cairo Transport Authority (CTA) buses.

Mohamed’s second reason was that, as well as paying for a ticket, you need to find some way to get to the train station “I live in Al-Zohour Square in the social housing units in the Capital Gardens, that’s three kilometres from the station, so I need some kind of local transport to get me there. That’ll cost five pounds, which is the same as the cost of getting me all the way to the capital.” Mohamed complains at the lack of public transport inside Capital Gardens city.

There are car parks for private cars outside each LRT station, some of which can accommodate up to two thousand cars. This is a free service, aimed at attracting private car owners to use public transport to travel from the cities of eastern Cairo, according to the Ministry of Transport and statements made on more than one occasion by the minister, Kamel Al-Wazir.

But on our tour of Obour, Capital Gardens, Badr, and Heliopolis stations, we found the car parks there empty, except for Ministry of Transport passenger service buses. This is in stark contrast to the photos of large numbers of vehicles in the station car parks, which are put out by the Ministry of Transport in response to news reports that people are reluctant to use the LRT.

comparison between the images published by the Ministry of Transport and the images captured by the investigation's reporter

The way residents of Badr City relate to and use the Capital Train is no different from those living in Shorouk City. Forty-year-old Fathi El-Sayyid (not his real name), who lives in social housing in the Andalos neighbourhood of Badr City, says that he does not use the train because the station is so far from where he lives. Andalos, where Fathi El-Sayyid has lived for three years with wife and four children, lies at the far end of Badr City and its residents suffer from a lack of services, especially public transport, which is limited to buses run by the CTA and a private company. The main stop for Badr City is seven kilometres from El-Sayyed’s home and his job is in Cairo’s Nasr City. His and his wife’s family live in El-Marg and visiting them is difficult because of the shortage of transport means and the high cost.

We continued our journey on the train to the Administrative Capital, which has two stations: Capital Airport, and City of Arts and Culture. A third station is still under construction. Unlike the cities in eastern Cairo that are on the LRT route, the stations in the capital are located in the centre, and buses line up outside to take employees to the government district and other neighbourhoods within the capital.

On the return trip, the largest number of passengers boarded the train at the two Administrative Capital stations. These were mostly people working in the government district, which was moved to the Administrative Capital in mid-2023. At that time, 100 government agencies were transferred, along with more than 40,000 employees, who are currently working from these new offices. They were encouraged to transfer through benefits provided by the government. These included an allowance for moving or the provision of apartments, either in the new capital itself or Capital Gardens.

Despite this transfer of large numbers of civil servants, the LRT is not crowded at the end of official working hours, as we have shown, with the number of empty seats.

The situation did not change during our journey back to the Adly Mansour terminus. Most passengers boarded the train at the Capital Airport and City of Arts and Culture stations, while no more than ten got into our compartment or neighbouring compartments at the other stations.

There is insufficient data on per capita spending on transport, but transport costs rank fourth in annual spending by Egyptians, and has gone up repeatedly over the last decade, as the government has implemented a program to remove fuel subsidies.

Spending by Egyptians on transport ranges from six percent to 30 percent of annual family income. But it’s a completely different situation for Mohsen Mohammed, who spends approximately six thousand pounds, equivalent to his whole monthly salary. Mohamed works in the Fifth Settlement neighbourhood, which is located within the urban conglomeration of eastern Cairo. He is forced to take four different modes of transport to get to work and the same to return home, which costs him 70 pounds a day (about US$1.5, based on the current average exchange rate of 47 pounds to the dollar). On top of this is the transport costs for his three children, who are at different stages of education.

The experiences differ, but the financial burden of transport cost is the same. Fathi El-Sayyid, who lives in Badr City, spends 50 percent of his monthly salary of six thousand pounds on transport. The journey to and from work costs him 50 pounds a day (about $1, according to the current average exchange rate). And roughly the same amount is needed to take his children to and from school.

Mohamed Mohsen and Fathi El-Sayyid are two examples of those who benefitted from a social housing project, launched by the Egyptian government in 2014, and dubbed by the media the “One Million Units Project.” This was designed to help those who have no private car and rely mainly on public transport in the cities of Badr, Capital Gardens, Shorouk, and Obour, east of Cairo.

Contrary to the popular saying in Egypt: “If you want to be happy, keep close to someone happy” there has been no improvement in the position of the city of New Heliopolis, which is adjacent to the Administrative Capital. It was built 20 years before the new capital, but is still a “ghost city,” in the words of Abdel Baseer El-Rahmani, who lives there “If I’m walking in the city at 12 noon, even then I rarely see a car and there’s no-one walking, let alone at night.”

There is an LRT station on the outskirts of the city, on the Cairo-Ismailia desert road side, and the government thought this would solve the chronic transport problem. But Abdel Basir believes that in reality the train has changed nothing, because the station is in the north of the city, and there is no local means of transport to take passengers from the south of the city to the north to catch the train.

Abdul Basir says it is about seven kilometers from where he lives to the train station, and it is challenging to cover this distance without a car or some local means of transport. Those living in the south of New Heliopolis prefer to use some mode of transport along the Egypt-Suez road to reach their destination, rather than crossing the whole city just to reach the train station on the north side.

Abdul Basir, one of the thousand residents of New Heliopolis - which exceeds 5,888 acres in area - complains of the slow pace of construction in the city and the lack of transport. Although the city is nearly 30 years old, those living there still complain about the lack of basic services.

In February 2023, the Ministry of Transport concluded a contract with nine public transport companies to carry passengers from Cairo to the Administrative Capital - a total of 369 buses, operating across 48 routes.

Although Capital Gardens City was built to house government employees, who had been transferred to new workplaces in the Administrative Capital, the Ministry of Transport provided no more than a few buses to take residents to the capital. Mahmoud Ali, who managed to acquire a housing unit in Capital Gardens City, objected to this: “A whole fleet of buses stops in the capital, because there aren’t enough passengers, and yet we can’t get any transport in Capital Gardens.” When Mahmoud and a group of other residents contacted the Ministry of Transport and the transport company, this was their response: “The company would make a loss in Capital Gardens, because the population density is too low.”

Mahmoud asks: “How come the state allocated housing units for low-income people, when there is no transport?”

Mahmoud thinks that the LRT was the only transport assigned by the Ministry of Transport to serve residents of Capital Gardens, but that the train was no help to them, because the station is over three kilometers from the social housing units and there is no local transport to take them there.

Local residents contacted the Capital Gardens City Authority, who told them that the issue was one for the Ministry of Transport. Mahmoud says:

Mahmoud predicts that the situation will not change once the city is fully constructed, and that the state will provide no new means of transport for people on low incomes. He thinks that when Al Noor City - one of the most prestigious new residential neighborhoods in the locality - is completed, the development company will content itself with providing local buses for Al Noor residents, as it did previously in the Al-Rehab and Madinaty projects.

Now that the first and second phases of the LRT have been in operation for nearly two years, the controversy continues over how worthwhile the project is and how far it has achieved its goals. The government has announced that a fifth phase will open within the capital, bringing the total number of stations there to only eight, with the one serving Capital Gardens City.

The other cities in eastern Cairo, some of which are over half a century old, have only one station outside the urban areas, and they are still suffering a transport crisis, that has not been alleviated by having the Capital Train run through their outskirts. At the same time, the Ministry of Transport has signed a new memorandum of understanding to set up an electric train to run from the New Administrative Capital to Al-Rehab City in the First Settlement in New Cairo.

This investigation was completed with support from ARIJ