From Transport to Wedding Venue: Cairo’s Monorail Struggles to Attract Riders

On the morning of July 1, the first day of the 2026/2027 fiscal year, Walid Mahmoud, 52, an employee at the Ministry of Religious Endowments headquarters, waited for a train at Bulaq El-Dakrour station. The metro’s internal radio announced that the minimum wage was rising from EGP 7,000 to EGP 8,000. The bulletin ended and songs celebrating June 30 began, while Walid thought about the daily cost of reaching his workplace in the New Administrative Capital.

“I haven’t tried the monorail and I won’t. A one-way ticket costs 80 pounds,” Walid tells Zawia3. He lives on Humphreys Street in Bulaq El-Dakrour and takes the metro to Adly Mansour in northeastern Cairo, then changes to a microbus for the ministry’s headquarters in the new capital.

Monorail fares start at EGP 20 for up to five stations, rising to EGP 40 for ten, EGP 55 for fifteen and EGP 80 for the full 22-station route from Nasr City to the new capital. Single metro tickets across its three lines cost EGP 10 for up to nine stations, EGP 12 for sixteen, EGP 15 for twenty-three and EGP 20 for thirty-nine stations.

Walid estimates that using the monorail would cost him more than EGP 200 daily. He would first take the metro to Stadium station, then the monorail, followed by an internal capital-city bus costing EGP 5 to travel between buildings.

Urban researcher Ibrahim Ezz El-Din says the problem goes beyond poor integration with other transport. It includes a lack of integration with existing cities and people’s lives. Planning must consider the whole daily journey: reaching the departure station, using the service and traveling from the arrival station to the workplace or final destination.

He tells Zawia3 these basic considerations should have shaped the monorail plan. He questions whether its purpose is to meet citizens’ needs or simply construct a huge link to the new capital. In his view, residents’ income levels and the capital’s prices mean most can afford private vehicles and do not rely on the monorail as their main transport.

Ezz El-Din says officials themselves do not depend on collective transport, and owners of villas and residential units in the new capital have private vehicles.

To attract passengers, the operator offers a 50% ticket discount on Fridays, Saturdays and public holidays. The Transport Ministry has also introduced subscriptions with discounts of up to 50% on ordinary fares.

Proper planning does not mean building a transport service and then looking for reasons people might use it, Ezz El-Din argues. That reverses the planning process: “It is like buying the shoelaces before the shoes.”

A transport project succeeds by meeting clear development goals: enabling movement to new urban areas, shortening daily home-to-work commutes and offering affordable costs. Those benefits give people a natural reason to use it.

The monorail: transport or an outing?

In 2021, the government and Transport Ministry rejected criticism that the monorail lacked value. Its first phase officially began operating on May 6, 2026, but academics continue to question its usefulness to ordinary citizens and its economic rationale.

The design, construction, operation and maintenance contract exceeded $4.5 billion (€4.1 billion), according to the August 5, 2019 agreement between Bombardier Transportation, Orascom Construction, Arab Contractors and the National Authority for Tunnels. Bombardier’s share was around $2.85 billion (€2.6 billion), while Orascom’s was approximately $900 million, alongside other amounts the Arabic report does not identify.

In May 2026, Transport Minister Kamel El-Wazir said construction of the east- and west-Nile monorail cost only about $2.8 billion, rejecting the $4.5 billion figure. He argued that foreign borrowing for transport was cheaper than domestic loans, citing interest as low as 0.1% and repayment periods up to forty years. The construction figure and broader design-build-operate-maintain contract have different stated scopes; they are not presented here as interchangeable measures.

The east-Nile line links Stadium station on Metro Line 3 near Salah Salem Street with New Cairo and the New Administrative Capital over 56.5 kilometers and 22 stations. The west-Nile line links Giza’s Gameat El-Dowal station on Line 3 with Sheikh Zayed, Sixth of October and its extensions.

A Transport Ministry statement in September 2022 put construction cost per kilometer at $30 million and capacity at 25,000–45,000 passengers an hour and 600,000 daily.

Amid weak demand and discussion of the project’s failure, the east-Nile monorail management announced that weddings could be held inside stations or aboard trains. Management said the initiative aimed to strengthen citizens’ attachment to the new service.

Ezz El-Din says low initial ridership might be understandable if planners expected high use only after several years. The problem, in his view, is the absence of a clearly announced timetable for that objective.

If the government expected people to use it from day one, weak numbers indicate that the project does not answer an actual need, he says. Newly opened metro lines, by contrast, attract riders immediately because they meet existing demand.

He asks how many current users are new-capital residents or employees. Weak demand signals a planning problem, he argues: services created for genuine needs do not require campaigns inviting people to use them or hold weddings there.

Ticket reductions and promotional events to attract riders are unusual for public transport, Ezz El-Din says. Success should rest on real demand rather than publicity.

Economist Elhami El-Mirghani disagrees that weak demand can be considered normal in the first operating years. He sees it as evidence of flawed economic planning and route selection.

He tells Zawia3 that monorails are usually implemented in densely populated cities where narrow, crowded streets complicate surface metro or tram construction. In Egypt, he argues, the route crosses desert areas lacking population density, wasting resources and reflecting poor management.

The project was built with loans whose principal and interest are supposed to be paid from operating revenue, he adds. That raises questions about borrowing priorities and why funding is directed to such projects.

Planning a city before building its infrastructure

Ezz El-Din says urban transport planning has two principal purposes: serving a new city by connecting it to other places, or responding to an existing need to reduce traffic and congestion. A prior plan should define the project’s nature, objectives and intended users.

The monorail is supposed to serve the new capital. Its plan should therefore specify how many people are expected to move there, when the target population will be reached, where they will come from and whether intended users are ministry employees or residents relocating to the city.

Those details should be public, he says. Instead, Egyptians see only implementation, while the government selects projects without publishing their studies or planning justification. He considers this a failure of information transparency.

He points to new cities developed since the 1970s, many of which did not reach the populations their original plans targeted. In his assessment, the experiment was not fully successful and required reassessment, including its transport systems.

The relationship between population density, activities around stations and ridership depends on the project’s purpose. A service for a new city should explain whether its route passes through established urban areas that can supply passengers. Such information has not been clearly disclosed, he says.

People in established cities already use transport that meets daily needs, such as the metro or microbuses. They have little reason to use the monorail if it is far from home or work, or offers neither a shorter journey nor better service.

That raises a basic question about why the project was needed without a clear plan explaining its purpose and links to existing cities. Most Egyptian public-transport users have low or middle incomes, Ezz El-Din says, and the new capital is not yet their daily destination for housing or services. The gap concerns their needs and lifestyles as much as connections between transport modes.

An economy under pressure

The head of an economic research center, who asked not to be named for personal-safety reasons, says the monorail was “not timely and not the best project.” He tells Zawia3 that investment priorities should favor factories that increase production, create jobs, expand exports and earn foreign currency.

A prominent economist and academic who also requested anonymity calls the project economically unviable and its economic return negative. In his view, it contradicts the original rationale for the new capital.

The publicly stated goal was to move five to seven million people out of Greater Cairo, he says. Providing daily transport to carry them back and forth contradicts the resettlement principle on which the city was conceived.

New cities should accommodate residents and provide their services locally, rather than depend on daily travel from central Cairo, the economist argues. From this urban-planning perspective, he calls the monorail contrary to the capital’s purpose.

He says monorails internationally serve congested cities where road expansion or surface metro construction is difficult. Egypt’s long elevated route, he argues, runs counter to sound reasoning and feasibility assessment.

In his view, keeping the train above ground for roughly 56 kilometers departs from the usual uses of this transport and lacks technical and economic justification.

He claims that such a desert route on columns is unusual internationally, with Saudi Arabia an exception Egypt followed. This is the interviewee’s comparison, rather than an independently established survey of monorail systems.

He argues that elevated sections should bypass traffic bottlenecks in crowded cities before returning to ground level, rather than continue on a fully elevated route for long distances without a clear need.

This implementation, he says, raises questions about its technical and economic foundations and its consistency with urban planning and transport feasibility studies.

Low ridership is not the only measure

El-Mirghani says transport success cannot be measured by passenger numbers alone. Revenue, cash flow, capital-recovery time and economic and development returns matter too. In his assessment, the monorail meets none of these adequately and does not serve low-income citizens.

Persistently lower-than-target ridership means weak revenue, he says. The government may then have to divert resources from other budget lines or projects to repay principal and interest, turning the monorail into a public-finance burden.

Failure to achieve projected revenue, trips and passengers would make it a major economic mistake and reflect poor management, he argues.

Ezz El-Din also rejects ridership as the sole indicator. A service should be judged first against its development purpose. If it serves a new city, success means attracting residents and reducing pressure on existing cities, alongside accessibility, services and people’s ability to buy or rent housing there.

Fast, reasonably timed access, adequate services and residents’ purchasing power would mean success for both the transport and the city, he says. Transport is an instrument of wider development, not an end in itself.

Treating construction alone as an achievement exposes a planning problem, he adds. Real achievements are operating outcomes: lower population pressure, fewer accidents and a shift from private cars to public transport that saves time and money and improves mobility. These should guide evaluation of transport and new cities.

Planning should compare several alternatives for urban and economic feasibility before selecting one. Ezz El-Din says the monorail appeared from the outset to be the only option, as though owning a huge network mattered more than meeting an actual development need.

Cheaper alternatives included improving conventional collective transport and public buses and allocating dedicated lanes, he says. Instead, a project costing billions of pounds was accompanied by expropriation and reallocation of approximately 415 feddans of public and private land.

The scale of spending and expropriation imposes high social and economic costs, he argues. He considers the project more concerned with publicity and showcasing size than a genuine development objective, reflecting problems in information transparency and decision-making during planning and implementation.

The monorail is not for the poor—nor is the capital

The anonymous economist and academic reiterates that the project’s economic return is negative and its effect on the economy harmful. He expects a fate similar to the light rail transit system if weak demand continues.

He says the central issue is not ticket prices. “Even if it became free, what is the need for the monorail?” Without an actual need to use it, he argues, expected revenue cannot cover construction costs however high fares rise.

The alternative is to settle workers in the new capital by completing schools, universities, hospitals, markets, government services and other necessities, reducing the need to transport hundreds of thousands of employees daily.

He describes the underlying problem as a lack of vision rather than simply a flawed feasibility study. Planning should have prioritized residents’ ability to live in the capital instead of a huge system carrying them there and back every day.

El-Mirghani says EGP 20–80 fares suggest the feasibility study failed to account sufficiently for intended users’ social and economic circumstances or their ability to afford daily travel.

He also believes studies failed to estimate expected demand and adequately compare the monorail with a surface metro in cost, route, station numbers, fares and investment-recovery time.

Projects costing billions of dollars require precise feasibility studies grounded in realistic data and clear demand and return estimates, he says. He calls for those studies to be reviewed and their authors and approvers held accountable.

Ezz El-Din says fares of EGP 20–80 depending on journey length raise questions about the intended audience and whether pricing matches the project’s purpose.

Public transport in many European countries aims to attract private-car users, he notes, but travelers compare its cost with driving and may find cars cheaper. Low-income users compare it with conventional transport, including microbuses that may reach their destination for around EGP 10. Despite crowding, the cheaper option remains more attractive.

Project and operating costs should be central to planning from the start. High user costs raise a fundamental question: who will actually ride after the service opens?

The arrangement may add burdens for citizens, he argues. Instead of completing business around Tahrir Square through the low-cost metro network, they could face EGP 80 each way to reach the new capital, although the current vision suggests citizens will not need to visit it directly for government services.

With a broader contract valued at $4.5 billion and tickets reaching EGP 80, the monorail is trying to attract riders through discounts and weddings aboard trains. The government calls it a transformation in transport. Economists and urban researchers interviewed here say the debate extends beyond weak demand to planning, viability and the scale of genuine need.

After 3 p.m., Walid Mahmoud retraces his journey home by microbus and metro. Daily return transport consumes more than EGP 90: “Twenty pounds for the metro and twenty-six from Adly Mansour station to the ministry, and the same coming back.” He says changing his routine could increase the burden. A large share of his monthly salary already goes on reaching work after the ministry moved permanently from Bab El-Louq in central Cairo about three years earlier.