Cairo Traffic

Cairo Cairo Traffic
April 18-21, 1988

If I ever again become frustrated with slow-moving traffic during a rush hour, I will let my mind wander back to Cairo. The largest city in Africa, it is home to at least 16 million people. 3,500 new ones are added each day.

Not all of them have cars. That's fortunate, because the existing streets are clogged, and stop-and-go traffic is the norm. But that is not the worst problem.

We couldn't discern any particular rules of the road, other than that most streets were one-way. Red lights did not necessarily mean "stop" or even "slow", and it was the worst of mistakes to believe that a green "walk" light meant it was safe to cross the street. Cars flooded through red lights with horns blaring to warn anyone who might consider getting in the way. Dennis and I joked that some of the horns must be equipped with on-off switches that were locked in the "on" position.

It was an inhospitable environment for pedestrians. At first, we'd wait and wait to cross the streets, but eventually we had to learn to be bold, like the natives, stepping out whenever a gap of more than one car length occurred, and dodging our way through up to five lanes of traffic. Sometimes we'd be trapped, standing between unmarked lanes in the midst of traffic, for uncomfortable lengths of time. A few drivers enjoyed the game of coming as close to us as they dared. I dreaded crossing the streets, and as a pedestrian, was thankful for the large volume of traffic, which tended to slow everything down.

It seemed faster at certain times of the day to walk than to take a taxi, and we liked the exercise, if not the wear and tear on the feet. Sidewalks did exist in places, although often as not they were blocked with haphazardly parked cars, pushcarts, or the wares of shopowners and street vendors. Pedestrians therefore shared the streets with the cars (not to mention the bicycles, motorcycles, horse-drawn taxis, donkey-drawn carts, people-drawn carts, trolleys and buses). We watched policemen stop traffic at a busy intersection to allow a horse-drawn wagon to do a U-turn. Once our taxi passed a donkey-cart in a tunnel, and later we were amused to see a man trotting a camel over a major downtown bridge!

I was amazed at the sleek shining horses with rich harnesses, bells, and other trappings pulling rickety wooden carts loaded with vegetables and other merchandise. Once in a narrow street we had to dodge such a cart carrying a large block of dripping ice as it backed up to allow a mini-van to pass.

The donkeys stepped livelier than any I've ever seen, sometimes galloping, with their drivers swinging the reins in circles overhead. They literally skidded to stops on the pavement.

It was not necessary to wait for a bus at a designated stop. Would-be passengers caught them "on the run", chasing them down the street and jumping in (or "on" when there was no more "in"). We didn't learn to do this, as buses were terribly crowded. For 10 piasters ($.04) fare, I guess you can't expect first class.

In Brussels, we'd discovered what we called "minglesections"--intersections where 6-8 roads came together and in which there seemed to be no rules or order, just numerous vehicles attempting independently to weave their way through the traffic from one street to another. The Cairo minglesections made those in Brussels seem well organized!

We thought we could get around some of these frustrations when we discovered a shiny new Metro station in Tahrir Square. There was a map on the wall showing several color-coded subway lines, but the lines ran off the side of the map and everything was written in Arabic. We couldn't tell where the stations were or where the lines led.

We waited in line for "Information."

"Do you have any information on the underground?" asked Dennis. The young man pointed to the unintelligible map on the wall. We looked at each other in dismay.

In an attempt to get some information, I asked, "What is the fare?" His face was blank. "Fare, cost, price, ticket..."

"Oh, yes," he said. "That depends. Where are you going?"

We gave up and went back upstairs to dodge cars.

We later used the underground, as well as the "Nile Bus", a boat which crisscrosses the Nile River in both upstream and downstream directions. Both were bargains at $.10 a ride.