Egypt’s new monorail offers a modern ride, but Cairo is still not convinced

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Cairo, Egypt – On a weekday afternoon in early May, Mohammed Adel boarded the monorail at Musheer Tantawi station and watched Cairo’s cityscape scroll by.

The 48-year-old sales manager had boarded a train on the Egyptian capital’s latest public transport transit line, Cairo’s East Nile monorail, to test it. He was satisfied with the overall experience of his brief journey.

“It’s clean, the air conditioning is good, the experience is good and I hope it continues on the same level,” he said.

For the six-station trip from Musheer Tantawi towards the New Administrative Capital, he paid 40 Egyptian pounds ($0.76). By his calculation, the monorail saves him around 200 pounds compared with other transport options on the same route.

The East Nile monorail runs 56.6km (35 miles) between Nasr City, close to central Cairo, and the New Administrative Capital, where many government offices and ministries are now based.

A few seats away, Hind Tarek described the elevated experience of the ride as “close to the feeling of flying”, with the train suspended above Cairo’s bustling streets via a series of bridges.

She had taken the monorail, opened for the public on May 6, as an experience and listed its advantages readily: it connects difficult to reach parts of Cairo, especially newer districts and it should reduce pressure on the capital’s gridlocked roads.

But there are problems too. The distance to the nearest station still requires her to make an additional journey, while the 28-year-old teacher considers the cost of a ticket to be too expensive.

“The price,” she said, when asked about the drawbacks.

That tension, between the monorail as a genuine urban achievement and a service unaffordable to many commuters, has followed the line since its opening.

A city that needed a solution

Cairo is one of the 20 most populous cities in the world, with more than 10 million residents. For decades its transport infrastructure has struggled to keep pace, and it is hoped that the East Nile monorail is the answer to that problem.

The driverless, electric trains run on a series of elevated columns and tracks, integrating with the Light Rail Transit, Metro Line 3, and Bus Rapid Transit networks to create a more seamless travel experience.

Sixteen of 22 stations opened in the trial phase on May 6, with the remaining stations in Nasr City expected to follow within two months. The West Nile monorail, connecting Giza to 6th of October City, a satellite city that has been without a rail link for decades, is expected to open in September.

Osama Aqeel, an international transport expert and professor of road and transport engineering, said the rationale behind the project is primarily developmental.

“The state drew up a plan to solve traffic problems and expand roads and transport,” he told Al Jazeera. “The monorail, the metro, the LRT, and the BRT are four projects launched as a model of mass transit, because cities the size of Cairo face enormous traffic crises. The solution, in capitals and major cities, depends fundamentally on mass transit, not private cars.”

The cost of the project is approximately $2.8 billion, built in partnership with Alstom, Arab Contractors and Orascom, with Siemens donating trains to the Egyptian government. The monorail was chosen, according to Transportation Minister Kamel Al Wazeer, because it is cheaper than an underground metro, no buildings need to be demolished and minimal disruption is caused in streets.

At full capacity, the line can carry 600,000 passengers daily and, according to official figures, is expected to create around 20,000 jobs.

The view from the carriage

The experience itself is striking. Passengers pass over Nasr City’s rooftops, the 90th Street shopping centres, the American University in Cairo’s campus, and the wide compounds of New Cairo before the skyline of the New Administrative Capital opens up, revealing the Iconic Tower, the Al-Fattah Al-Aleem mosque and the green river axis.

On the opening days, younger passengers shared videos on social media they filmed of the city below whirring past them. For a generation accustomed to underground metro cars and clogged ring roads, it felt like something new.

But despite the novelty of riding the monorail, the atmosphere in stations, at least in the first days, was underwhelming, with only a handful of passengers in carriages during peak hours on Tuesday.

Fares are tiered: 20 pounds ($0.38) for up to five stations, 40 pounds ($0.76) for up to ten, 55 pounds ($1.05) for up to 15 and 80 pounds ($1.53) for the full 22-station line.

A 50 percent subscription discount is available for regular commuters, which can ease the daily burden for those who commit to it, but the numbers are still uncomfortable when set against wages.

Egypt’s minimum wage is 8,000 pounds a month, approximately $153 at current rates. Average monthly earnings in the public sector are around 14,660 pounds ($281), and 5,796 pounds ($111) in the private sector.

For a worker riding the full line daily with a subscription, the monthly cost reaches approximately 1,760 pounds ($33.80), around 22 percent of the minimum wage, before accounting for any additional transport legs to reach a station. The United Nations recommends that a household’s transport costs should not exceed 15 percent of total income, a threshold Aqeel cited directly.

“Mass transit must be accessible to all segments of the population according to their financial capacity,” he said.

Mohamed El-Shawadfi, a professor of management and investment, takes a more calibrated view. He argues that the monorail was a structural necessity when it was conceived in 2018 and 2019, and that the current fare levels reflect early-stage economics rather than a settled policy.

“The prices are not a barrier right now,” he told Al Jazeera. “But as demand increases, as the number of passengers grows, a balance can be reached between cost and usage. Today, ridership is low, so costs are high. In the future, when numbers rise and lines expand, the price can become competitive. And there are other advantages beyond transport – comfort, air conditioning, speed – that determine the value of the fare.”

Aqeel, however, believes the better expansion strategy lies with the Bus Rapid Transit system. Launched last June, it is lower cost and easier to maintain. For commuters who cannot afford the monorail fares, the BRT, metro and informal networks remain the practical alternative as it is already serving corridors the monorail does not reach.

Building for which Cairo?

The monorail connects the dense older districts of central Cairo to the satellite cities being built in the desert to the east, cities designed around investment, government ministries, wide boulevards and luxury compounds. El-Shawadfi is direct about this: “The monorail is made for a different social class”.

That framing does not necessarily make it indefensible. New cities require new infrastructure, and transport links that attract investment can, in theory, generate economic returns that benefit more than their immediate users.

But in a city where informal transport still accounts for the majority of daily journeys, and where inflation and currency devaluation have tightly compressed household budgets, the gap between what the monorail represents and what most people in Cairo can afford is hard to overlook.

For Adel, the sales manager who rode it that Tuesday afternoon, the system works for him. For Tarek, who found it beautiful and useful but too expensive for daily use, the verdict is more complicated.

“I just hope that the same level of services and current system is maintained,” he added.