By OMAR SINAN The Associated Press Sunday, May 21, 2006; 12:13 PM
CAIRO, Egypt -- Riding a Cairo taxi is like being trapped in a pinball machine. These rickety, un-air conditioned crates, their seats caked with grime, careen around corners and charge through red lights. Fare meters are frozen in time at 60 piasters _ about 10 cents. A sudden stop can make a loosely hinged door fly open.
But change is in the smoggy air.
Among the city's many thousands of vintage taxis, 150 yellow cabs have begun operating, equipped with air conditioning, credit card swipers, seat belts and catalytic converters to filter their exhaust.
The first new taxis, with "City Cab" emblazoned on their doors in Arabic and English hit the streets in March, an eco-friendly novelty in the city of 16 million and much of the Middle East.
Cairo's fleet is the brainchild of Egypt's modernizing prime minister, Ahmed Nazif, who has promised to have a total of the 1,500 new cabs in service by December.
Mohammed Hashem is responsible for 50 of the new vehicles and 45 drivers, two of them women. "Our streets needed such a project," he said as he watched young men wash and polish the imported Hyundais and Kias.
Africa's largest city has been called an "upended ashtray," and 1,500 new cabs are unlikely to dent its pollution. But authorities have big ambitions. "We are working on a program to replace all the old black-and-white taxis with new modern ones," said Wa'el Abdul Hameed, a pollution expert at the environment ministry.
Some Cairenes take heart from Bangkok's example, noting that even the notoriously congested and polluted capital of Thailand succeeded in phasing out its dilapidated taxis.
The old black-and-white cabs are mostly locally assembled Fiats or Ladas dating to the 1970s and 80s, but they remain popular in a country where one in five people still earns a dollar a day or less and fares are always negotiable.
Maha Selim, a 26-year-old office manager said her daily ride to work costs four pounds ($0.70). She took a yellow cab "just to know how much I would have to pay if I want clean, cool transportation in the summer," and it cost an extra three pounds ($0.50) _ too expensive to become a habit, she said.
Fumes from Cairo's roughly 2 million vehicles combine with industrial pollution and sand blown from the desert to keep the city of the Nile, pyramids and sphinx in an almost permanent haze. Car exhaust amounts to more than a quarter of the dirt in Cairo's air, and is one of the easier pollutants to eliminate, Abdul Hameed, the pollution expert, said.
Amira Othman, 40, sometimes spends two hours commuting 7 miles through Cairo traffic. "The old taxis are horrible," she said, exhausted and sweat-stained. "The weather is getting really hot, and they are neither comfortable, nor air conditioned."
"The new cabs are better," she said. The problem? "They are expensive and not available all the time."
Egyptian authorities are pushing the change with an eye on foreign tourists, for whom a taxi ride can deliver severe culture shock.
"We are paying more to feel much more comfortable, keep our dresses clean and stay out of the hot weather," said Alexandra Todt, a 26-year-old German woman riding a yellow cab.
The new taxis also cast light on the anomalies of Egypt's economy. Unemployment is officially at 9 percent, but is thought to be twice that. Many college graduates end up as construction workers or street vendors. And some cabbies earn more than lawyers.
Ali Mohammed Ali, 30, says he was making just 3,500 Egyptian pounds (about $650) a year as a lawyer and couldn't support his wife and daughter, so he switched to driving a yellow cab full-time and has tripled his income, he says.
He doesn't see his social status changing. "I really don't care about the difference between the two careers," he said. "This is a respectable job."
Mired in traffic on a bridge across the Nile, Ali shrugged and cranked up the classical music on his taxi's sound system, drowning out the din of car horns.
posted
mn...i know that city cab is a good idea but lets look at it from another side...a foreigner side...in Canada if i call a cab it will come in 5-6 min tops. my sister tried calling city cab to give it a try when we arrived in cairo and the usual happened..The number you are tying to reach is out of service or please check the number and try again...now...if i am not egyptian i would be very pissed off because with a good plan or good resturant or company you need after service or good customer service. city cab does not have that...even my friends could not go through to get a cab. but in canada I always get it in 6min tops and during x-mas or new years they tell me clearly that "we are sorry, the cab will be dealayed because of the season" which is fine..i can understand that...but here it is just not practical, expensive and the freaking number does not even work. how would an american or european or whatever think about this...
and honestly before making plans like this...prehaps we need to first fix the traffic, maybe make the streets cleaners more colorful, have old cars off the roads and make sure drivers are maintaining their cars to decrease the amount of smog. man, honestly egypt is so far behind US/Canada/Europe, around 10 years in everything...
Posts: 183 | From: Toronto, Canada / Cairo, Egypt | Registered: May 2006
| IP: Logged |
posted
When I was in Cairo last year the taxis didn't seem so bad to me. Admittedly, I knew the cabbies were all trying to over-charge the foreigner(I look like an arab/mixed asian to my english colleagues, but arabs know best ) but apart from that they weren't that bad.
[rant] Sometimes I just wish some things would be left alone...it seems like each day the east becomes more and more like the west. I'd like the two to be radically different.
Pouring concrete over everything and calling it 'progess' really pi**es me off [/rant]
Posts: 61 | From: England | Registered: May 2006
| IP: Logged |
UBBFriend: Email this page to someone!
![[Razz]](tongue.gif)
)
Printer-friendly view of this topic