cItIes 0n the m0ve

Megacities on the move - Sprawl-ville from Forum for the Future on Vimeo.

According to David Sims in Understanding Cairo there are roughly 53 vehicles per 1,000 inhabitants in Greater Cairo compared to 95 in Tehran, 200 in Mexico City, Bangkok and 301 in Sao Paulo. One can easily expect that Cairo will inevitably be swamped with cars whose owners will expect a privileged treatment for it is clear that transportation strategies for Greater Cairo-if there are any- are biased to make the desert gated communities work.This means by consequence that these strategies are mainly serving the private car as it is the main mode of transport in these new walled towns. that is being the case while currently only 11% of Greater Cairo's population only have access to private cars and only 4% live in these desert towns! As for the remaining overwhelming majority there is a proposal to privatize the government operated public bus system. additionally the construction of the new extension of the Cairo Metro system is going increasingly slow.
If the Egyptian state doesn't start on developing traffic management strategies and public transport sytems incl. dedicated busways, improving river bus systems and providing separate lanes for bicycle and motorbike riders- as this will encourage many who are eager to use this mode of transport but find it extremely difficult not to mention dangerous to manage their way through, it's expected that Cairo will go the way other mega-cities have gone were the private car rules an increasingly dysfunctional metropolis.