Our love of cars comes at a cost
Our love of (and dependence on) cars comes at a cost: We all know traffic congestion here is bad — who among us hasn’t been stuck on the Ring Road or in a gridlock at a regular intersection? The research backs up the anecdotal evidence: Cairo ranks 17 on a traffic index of the 403 most congested cities in the world. But the hours we spend stuck in traffic also have a very real impact on our finances. A 2010 World Bank report (pdf) estimated that Cairo’s traffic problems cost Egypt up to USD 8 bn, or around 4% of GDP. The expectation is that this figure will rise to USD 18 bn by 2030. By way of comparison, New York City ranks 42 on the index of congested cities, but congestion-related waste only comes to about 0.07% of US GDP.
Egypt’s problem is particularly acute, and likely to get worse: With some 9.9 mn licensed vehicles in Egypt in 2017, according to CAPMAS, and a population of roughly 100 mn, we currently have a ratio of one car to every ten people. And these are numbers that keep growing.