CAIRO: 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 machines, 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 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 Wael 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 LE 4 (70 cents). 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 (50 cents), 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 11 km 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 LE 3,500 (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. AP
