Policy Paper: Towards Transit-Centric New Desert Communities in the Greater Cairo Region

This paper was prepared by Mohamed Hegazy, Policy Entrepreneur focused on applied urban informatics, and co-founder of Transport for Cairo (TfC), under the supervision of Alternative Policy Solutions' research unit, . The preparation of the paper involved expansive consultation sessions, including one-on-one meetings and workshops with several experts and officials.

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Executive Summary 

This policy paper suggests solutions for utilizing urban mobility within the New Desert Communities (NDCs) to improve the living conditions of existing residents and attract more people to currently vacant housing, rather than simply continuing to focus on expansion. Specifically, using new transit data, this paper develops a citizen-centric model of urban accessibility that measures mobility and connectivity within NDCs and to other parts of the Greater Cairo Region (GCR). This model is innovative in including services provided by paratransit – known as informal transport hitherto understudied and overlooked despite providing the majority of transit connectivity across the GCR. The paper computes the Journey Gap, i.e. the difference in time between taking a private car or using public transit, while propositioning it as a leading indicator.

The study chooses El-Sheikh Zayed City as an example to analyze movements within NDCs due to its relatively small size as a NDC, its monocentric internal network where all services start at Hyper One, and its clear borders where all services end within the NDC borders. Moreover, the paper provides a quick overview of the transport plans for some of the world’s most successful megacities, which face similar problems to Cairo. The countries explored are London, Los Angeles, and Paris. Moving forward, it presents an established global conceptual framework for urban mobility governance and policy-making tailored for the African and Middle Eastern context. The Enable - Avoid - Shift - Improve (EASI) framework consists of four pillars; each pillar is accompanied by a case study from a city in a developing country  (Nigeria, South Africa, Senegal, Colombia).

The suggested recommendations aim to decrease journey times for public transport and walking. It suggests a long-term vision to improve accessibility of services and opportunities for  all through better public transit, while simultaneously reducing the reliance on private vehicles. It hopes to enliven the New Desert Communities by fundamentally targeting the loss of accessibility due to relocation, while simultaneously avoiding an environmentally unfriendly and congested future. The paper presents a package of suggestions to improve mobility within El-Sheikh Zayed City based on EASI.

To achieve sustainable change in the urban mobility domain, some enabling policies at the national scale are suggested to shift modal share away from private cars and towards a mix of public transit and non-motorized modes of travel. Recommendations further span the regional and local level.  They focus on reducing the identified journey time gap, ameliorating service and thus (a) moving people away from private cars and towards transit and (b) enhancing the accessibility of NDC residents, contributing to population relocation and NDC development towards functioning communities.  

While the current proposals are aimed at El-Sheikh Zayed City in particular, they are generalizable in some form or modification to the other seven NDCs within the GCR, as well as for creating a guide for the development of the New Administrative Capital. Even though a commonality exists, the proposals should not be understood as recommendations for urban mobility within inner-city Cairo. The complex nature and importance of geographic context dictates a separate analysis and set of recommendations for the dense inner-city of Cairo, to be focused on separately.