On September 2, 2026, a passenger bus overturned near the Al-Saada incline on the road between Dahab and Nuweiba in South Sinai, leaving 22 people dead and 28 injured, including Jordanian nationals. The road had undergone several phases of upgrading. In a Cabinet statement dated September 21, 2023, the transport minister described work on sections of the approximately 77-kilometre route intended to facilitate freight movements to and from Nuweiba port, serve tourism and protect road users from crashes. That background makes assessing the safety impact of the announced improvements essential, while distinguishing between the different phases and their implementation dates.
Earlier, on August 11, 2026, two trucks carrying day labourers collided on the Dawawis road in Ismailia. In its subsequent statement, the Public Prosecution reported 18 deaths and 30 injuries. A follow-up news report on August 15 put the death toll at 19. Prosecutors said a burst rear-right tyre on one vehicle caused it to lose balance and collide with the other, while investigations continued. Government action followed to review the road’s physical condition and safety measures. On August 25, two weeks later, another collision on the same road sent 17 injured people, including workers, to hospital, according to statements from the Egypt Healthcare Authority’s Ismailia branch.
Despite hundreds of billions of Egyptian pounds spent on roads, bridges and upgrading the existing network over the past decade, road crashes caused 44,940 deaths and 476,126 injuries between 2019 and 2025, according to the combined annual figures of the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics, or CAPMAS.
Deaths rose by 10.8% and injuries by 10.7% in a single year. Egypt recorded 5,829 deaths and 84,553 injuries from road crashes in 2025, compared with 5,260 deaths and 76,362 injuries in 2024. The fatality rate also increased from 4.9 to 5.4 deaths per 100,000 people, while the injury rate rose from 71.7 to 78.4 per 100,000.
Deaths had fallen by approximately 10.3% in 2024 compared with 2023, from 5,861 to 5,260. Injuries, however, increased over the same period from 71,016 to 76,362. The fall in deaths therefore did not become a sustained trend: fatalities rose again in 2025, while injuries continued climbing.
The age tables in the 2025 bulletin show that people aged 15 to under 25 recorded the highest totals for both injuries, at 29,101, and deaths, at 1,580. This is a different category from children under 15. Geographically, Dakahlia recorded the largest number of injuries, at 17,975, while Cairo had the most deaths, at 779. The crash severity ratio, the number of deaths per 100 injured people, was approximately 6.9, close to the previous year’s level. The bulletin notes that injury data from Port Said and Luxor had not been received following their hospitals’ entry into the comprehensive health insurance system. Missing data for those governorates must therefore not be interpreted as an absence of injuries.
Casualties rise despite major construction
Since 2014, Egypt’s road network has seen extensive spending, construction and upgrading. In a government presentation at the “Story of a Homeland” conference in October 2023, the transport minister put the cost of road and bridge projects for 2014 to 2024 at approximately EGP 530 billion, within a broader transport programme. That figure covers roads and bridges, rather than new main roads alone. The presentation included roughly 7,000 kilometres of new roads, improvements to the existing network and its connections, an increase in the main network’s length to approximately 30,500 kilometres, and the construction of 935 bridges.
Although deaths fell from 7,762 in 2022 to 5,260 in 2024, injuries increased from 55,991 to 76,362 over that period. Both indicators then rose in 2025.
A road safety expert who requested anonymity says even one death imposes political and moral responsibilities on the authorities, let alone tens of thousands of victims. These numbers make it difficult to treat crashes as isolated incidents, he argues. They require clear lines of responsibility and policies whose results can be measured and scrutinised.
He contrasts the toll with the hundreds of billions spent on roads during the same period, questioning how that expenditure has affected safety indicators, where the money has been directed and how projects have been implemented.
Evaluating spending efficiency requires an independent study, he says, particularly given the limited detailed information about financial flows, contracts, implementation arrangements and subcontracting. He describes the information gap as a “black box”: enormous sums have gone into the sector, but detailed information about their use and impact on safety remains limited. He sums up the problem as “no transparency and no accountability,” arguing that their absence obstructs assessment of the results of major road investments.
Who bears the greatest risk?
The expert says weaknesses in the safety system do not affect all road users equally. Groups already more exposed to danger, particularly informal workers, bear a disproportionate share of the consequences.
Agricultural and industrial labourers still travel in unsafe conditions, he says, in trucks or overcrowded minibuses. Such transport can turn a single crash into a mass-casualty incident.
Children and young people also make up a major share of road casualties, according to the studies and data he cites. Road crashes are among the leading causes of death in some age groups. In his assessment, Egypt’s population structure magnifies the loss: around 60% of Egyptians are under 30.
The expert estimates the economic losses caused by road crashes at between 3% and 5% of gross domestic product, arguing that the figure captures substantial economic and social costs beyond a crash’s immediate consequences. This is an estimate offered in the interview, rather than a new calculation by this report of the cost of crashes in 2025.
He also stresses the importance of joining the African Road Safety Charter, arguing that international commitments provide mechanisms for monitoring, accountability and reducing deaths. The African Union’s status list, updated on May 22, 2026, shows that Egypt had not signed, ratified or acceded to the charter, which entered into force in March 2026. Egypt’s absence from the list of parties does not, by itself, establish that it has announced a refusal to join. It identifies its position in the latest list verified by Zawia3. The expert says measurable targets and periodic reporting are essential to tracking road safety and quality.
The figures put the government’s performance under scrutiny
MP Freddy El-Bayady tells Zawia3 that the success of road projects should be measured neither by the number of kilometres paved nor by the amount of money spent, but by the number of lives saved.
In his view, the official figures indict the government’s performance. Road deaths reached 5,829 in 2025, up from 5,260 in 2024, an increase of 10.8%. Injuries rose to 84,553 from 76,362, an increase of 10.7%. That means the country loses approximately 16 people every day, he says, while someone is injured on its roads about every six minutes.
“More seriously, the number of injured people rose from 71,000 in 2023 to more than 84,000 in 2025, an increase approaching 19% in just two years,” he says. “Meanwhile, the Transport Ministry announced that road and bridge projects between 2014 and 2024 cost approximately EGP 530 billion.”
He asks how hundreds of billions can be spent while deaths and injuries rise, and where the impact of that expenditure on public safety can be seen.
El-Bayady says he is not opposed to building roads. He objects to reducing a road to a layer of asphalt, a bridge and an inauguration sign. A safe road requires sound engineering, regular maintenance, lighting, barriers and warning signs, treatment of dangerous locations, effective oversight of trucks and transport operators, serious vehicle inspections, enforcement of speed limits and driving hours, and a rapid emergency medical response.
He rejects what he describes as the government’s tendency to reduce every disaster to “driver error,” followed by punishment of a junior employee while senior officials escape responsibility. “Responsibility belongs to an entire system,” he says. “Every official who had the power to prevent a disaster and did not use it must face political, administrative and criminal accountability.”
The MP says he submitted a parliamentary question to the prime minister and the ministers of transport, interior and local development after the Dahab–Nuweiba crash. He requested details of the road’s most recent engineering assessment, the bus’s condition and maintenance record, and the operator’s compliance with safety standards and driving-hour requirements. He also called for an updated map of high-risk locations across the road network and a timetable for addressing them.
El-Bayady had previously submitted urgent parliamentary briefing requests after repeated crashes on the Regional Ring Road, alongside earlier oversight interventions concerning deteriorating roads and delayed maintenance. He has called for a full account of the billions spent, a public plan to stop road deaths, and accountability for senior officials before junior staff are made scapegoats.
The road safety expert agrees that road development should not be assessed solely by kilometres completed or bridges built. Design must suit those who use the road. A new road or bridge in a residential area may improve traffic flows and connections between cities, but it can also increase the risk of vehicles striking pedestrians, children and older people if residents’ movement between the two sides is overlooked.
He warns that widening roads and building bridges can encourage drivers to believe they can travel faster, particularly where speed enforcement is limited.
For him, the question is not simply whether laws exist, but whether they are applied and enforcement tools work. He also argues that changes to traffic legislation have focused heavily on increasing penalties without sufficiently improving the wider system of traffic rules and safety.
He describes “structural mistakes in the way the issue is managed” as the core problem, arguing that Egypt’s road safety performance remains below the level required by international standards.
The government, for its part, points to major improvements in road quality. The Cabinet’s Media Centre announced that Egypt had advanced 100 places to rank 18th globally, attributing the position to a road quality index. The figure is presented here as a government statement about infrastructure quality, rather than an independent ranking of road safety or reductions in fatalities. These are different outcomes, which the same index does not measure.
The government links that improvement to the National Roads Project. The “Story of a Homeland” document published by the Information and Decision Support Center lists approximately 5,000 kilometres of road construction costing EGP 127 billion, alongside upgrades to more than 6,400 kilometres of routes costing EGP 165 billion. Those figures relate to the scope and period covered by that government presentation. They should not automatically be added to the broader EGP 530 billion figure or treated as a separate additional bill.
What causes road crashes?
Abdallah Abu Khadra, a professor of road engineering at Beni Suef University, tells Zawia3 that road crashes involve three principal elements: people, vehicles and roads. He cites an earlier analysis attributed to CAPMAS that assigns approximately 70% of causes to the human factor, 26% to vehicles and 4% to roads. The interview did not identify the statistical year for that breakdown. It is therefore presented as the basis for his interpretation, rather than a new finding taken from the 2025 bulletin.
In his view, the human contribution may exceed 70%, because drivers are responsible not only for how they drive but also for ensuring their vehicles are roadworthy. That includes regular maintenance and replacing tyres and other components when required.
Abu Khadra says the human factor also includes compliance with traffic rules: observing speed limits, travelling in the correct direction and lane, and following instructions appropriate to different weather and environmental conditions. Mist, fog and sand-laden winds affect visibility, he notes, requiring drivers to observe the lower speeds specified in traffic advisories rather than limits intended for normal conditions.
Using a mobile phone while driving, including calls and messages, is another dangerous behaviour that increases crash risks, he adds. So are fatigue, exhaustion, alcohol and other substances that impair concentration and reaction.
He stresses the need to leave sufficient distance between vehicles. A car does not stop the instant its brakes are applied. A driver first needs time to see a hazard, understand it and decide how to respond, followed by the distance the vehicle travels while actually slowing to a stop. That stopping distance is directly related to speed.
He sees traffic awareness and behaviour as central to reducing crashes, while emphasising that responsibility does not fall on drivers alone. All road users, including pedestrians, form part of the road safety system.
The professor says Egypt has experienced an “unprecedented leap” in road quality in recent years, citing the reported advance from 118th to 18th place and the ambition to reach the top ten. He argues that improvements in infrastructure need to be matched by comparable progress in public awareness and road behaviour.
Among the principal safety measures, he identifies separating heavy goods traffic from passenger cars on busy routes, building concrete lanes for heavy vehicles and replacing at-grade intersections with bridges and tunnels. These measures reduce conflicts between vehicles and improve road safety, he says.
He also points to the introduction of intelligent transport systems, or ITS, on several routes. Their purpose, he explains, is to improve control of transport flows, monitor speeds, loads and safety, and make more efficient use of the network.
According to Abu Khadra, infrastructure improvements have been accompanied by changes to operations, oversight and law enforcement. He highlights the Interior Ministry’s use of fixed and mobile checkpoints and radar, together with digitised traffic procedures that help record violations and vehicle details and notify owners.
He also describes continuing road safety campaigns through the media, schools, universities, mosques and churches. Professional driver training, particularly for tourist coaches, taxis, trucks and public transport, is intended to improve drivers’ skills, reactions and ability to handle changing road conditions.
Abu Khadra regards deterrent law enforcement as a central response to dangerous road behaviour. He points to increased penalties for several offences and continuing inspection campaigns, including checks intended to prevent driving under the influence of alcohol or other substances that affect driving safety.
The nature of the road must also be considered when analysing crashes, he says. Driving in mountainous areas differs from driving on level roads, particularly on steep slopes, where motorists must follow speeds and driving practices suited to the terrain. Excessive speed on a descent can cause a driver to lose control regardless of the vehicle’s capabilities or equipment.
Abu Khadra also argues that reducing crashes requires making better use of other transport options, particularly railways and inland waterways, to ease the loads and traffic volumes on roads.
Increasing rail freight could reduce pressure on the road network, limit wear and extend its useful life, he explains. Lower traffic volumes could, in turn, affect crash rates.
He points to railway upgrades and the construction of high-speed lines, arguing that additional rail capacity could shift a substantial share of passenger and freight movements away from roads and improve road safety.
River transport is another alternative capable of carrying large loads, he says. He cites work on river ports, dredging the Nile’s navigation channel, and improving locks and waterways as measures that could increase its contribution to freight transport.
An integrated transport system combining roads, railways and waterways would do more than improve mobility, he argues. It could also improve road safety, reduce congestion, protect infrastructure and lower transport costs and pollution.
Ultimately, he says, developing the transport network should ease the burden of travel and protect people and public and private property. Doing so requires infrastructure improvements to be combined with public awareness, compliance with rules, effective oversight and enforcement.
Where are the dangerous locations?
CAPMAS’s official annual bulletins on the outcomes of road and railway crashes contain detailed tables of locations classified as the “most dangerous points on roads,” organised by road and the governorates through which it passes.
The 2023 list covers approximately 67 roads, while the 2024 list covers 70. But the tables differ in structure and do not support a simple comparison of two totals as a verified change in dangerous locations. The 2023 table places descriptions of hazardous sites alongside columns for road length, ambulance points and vehicles. The 2024 table lists hazardous locations in text, including extended stretches and roads described as dangerous along their entire length. Ambulance point counts must therefore not be treated as counts of dangerous locations, and a change in the number of listed entries does not establish an improvement in safety.
The 2023 table includes figures of 53 for the International Coastal Road, 34 for the Cairo–Aswan Western Desert Road, 27 for the Cairo–Alexandria Agricultural Road, 26 for the Free Road, 21 for the Greater Cairo Ring Road, and 18 each for the Regional Ring Road and the Galala–Zaafarana–Hurghada–Quseir route. These appear in the points-on-the-road column within the ambulance information. Dangerous locations are described separately. Examples include village entrances, junctions and U-turns on the coastal road, locations near Sindiyun, Qaha and Toukh on the agricultural road, and stretches around Regional Ring Road entrances and exits.
The 2024 bulletin again identifies locations on the Cairo–Alexandria agricultural and desert roads, the Cairo–Aswan Western Desert Road, the International Coastal Road and the Greater Cairo Ring Road. Examples include the Smouha entrance and El Nozha airport on the agricultural road, areas near Amreya and Abdel Qader on the desert road, and locations near El Marg, El Khosous and Basous on the Ring Road. The list also includes entire stretches or distances between kilometre markers. Counting every name as one separate point would therefore not provide a consistent method for comparing roads or years.
These locations are not confined to one geographical area. They appear on roads across the Delta, Greater Cairo, Upper Egypt, Sinai, the New Valley and Matrouh, demonstrating how widely the officially identified high-risk areas extend across the network.
The Regional Ring Road is particularly prominent in the official data. Locations along it repeatedly appeared in the lists of dangerous sites for 2022, 2023 and 2024, including areas in Cairo, Giza, Qalyubia, Fayoum and Sharqia, with some locations or stretches recurring from one year to another.
A structural problem
The anonymous road safety expert says the past decade has seen enormous investment in new and wider roads, bridges and technology. Infrastructure has visibly improved, but safety indicators have not improved to the same extent. Deaths and injuries have continued to rise, especially among particular groups, he argues, making it necessary to examine how design and road use relate to crash patterns and casualties.
He tells Zawia3 that pedestrians account for approximately 28% of road deaths according to the studies he cites, without specifying the year of that estimate. He sees this as an indication of shortcomings in road design and crossing arrangements. For a time-specific comparison, CAPMAS’s 2025 bulletin records 2,132 pedestrian deaths out of 5,829 fatalities, approximately 36.6% according to Zawia3’s calculation. The two percentages should not be treated as one consistent series without aligning the year, source and definition. The expert adds that users of public and semi-public transport face substantial risks, given many Egyptians’ reliance on minibuses and some buses with weaker compliance with safety standards.
The scale of the human loss requires treating road safety as an issue that extends beyond infrastructure development, he says. Egypt records thousands of deaths every year, alongside large numbers of injured people.
Responding to the tendency to assign primary responsibility to people, the expert cites another figure used in earlier analyses, 76%, before challenging explanations focused solely on the driver. Like Abu Khadra’s 70% estimate, this figure is not presented here as a consistent, current breakdown of the causes of crashes in 2025. Neither interview identified the year and methodology underlying the respective measurements. The expert argues that confining responsibility to human error overlooks the central principle of the Safe System approach.
Safe road use includes issues such as drink-driving, failure to wear seat belts and distraction, he explains. Legislation and enforcement are supposed to limit their consequences. In his reading of the World Health Organization’s global report, Egypt’s performance against international standards reveals gaps in several of these areas.
He explains that the approach developed in response to the idea that individuals alone are responsible for crashes. It starts from the reality that people make mistakes. The objective is not to eliminate every mistake, but to design roads, vehicles and systems that prevent those mistakes from becoming fatal.
The question should not end with “Why did the driver make a mistake?”, he says. It should extend to why the surrounding environment allowed that mistake to become a deadly crash. A safe road should limit the consequences of human errors, rather than assume they will never occur.
Fragmented responsibilities weaken accountability
The expert proposes a higher-level road safety body with authority that extends across the different institutions involved. There should be a clearly identifiable body that can be held responsible for the results of road safety policies, he argues.
The involvement of numerous authorities, including the transport and interior ministries and local administrations, together with roads falling under different jurisdictions, complicates the allocation of responsibility for failures and crashes, he says.
He points to international recommendations that a road safety body should answer to the highest level of government, whether the Cabinet or the presidency, so that it can scrutinise all relevant ministries and agencies. Placing it under one ministry, such as transport, could limit its ability to hold others accountable. If an ambulance or medical response is delayed, for example, who has the authority to question the Health Ministry?
He stresses that he is seeking an executive body with real coordination and accountability powers, rather than another advisory council. That requires political will and public recognition of road safety as an institutional responsibility, not a collection of unrelated crashes. His proposal should be read alongside WHO’s 2023 Egypt profile, which already records a national lead agency and a road safety strategy. His objection therefore concerns the effectiveness of powers, coordination and accountability, rather than denying the existence of institutional arrangements.
A heavy financing burden
The efficiency of spending cannot be considered separately from the transport sector’s financing burden, while still distinguishing sector-wide debt from road project costs. In televised remarks in March 2026, Transport Minister Kamel El-Wazir estimated loans for his ministry’s projects at USD 18 billion to USD 20 billion. Comparing them with external debt of around USD 160 billion, he put the share at roughly 12% to 12.5%. In a parliamentary session in June 2026, he referred to USD 14 billion. Fact-checking platform Matsda2sh compared that figure with external debt of USD 163.9 billion in December 2025, producing a share of approximately 8.5%. These are statements and comparisons from different dates, not one statistical range for a single current balance.
On August 30, 2026, the minister said roads, bridges and dry ports were not financed through loans, and that development loans were used for locomotives, high-speed rail and the metro, up to a maximum of 30% of project costs. The ministry links such financing to imported components, including trains, signalling and control systems, and tunnel-boring machines. It says some agreements provide grace periods of up to ten years and repayment periods of up to forty years. This is the ministry’s explanation of financing arrangements. It does not make the combined debt of transport authorities debt incurred for roads alone.
In its analysis of the economic authorities’ final accounts for 2023/2024, Matsda2sh reported total debts of approximately EGP 2.43 trillion, including EGP 466.7 billion for transport authorities excluding the Suez Canal Authority, or around 19.2%. That figure is a debt stock for particular authorities in a specified financial year and covers other transport activities. It cannot be directly equated with road construction costs or new borrowing planned for a later year.
Transport authorities nevertheless account for the largest share of new borrowing targeted in the 2026/2027 budget. They plan to borrow approximately EGP 321.9 billion, representing 70.1% of the economic authorities’ total planned borrowing. That includes EGP 170.8 billion in domestic loans and the equivalent of EGP 151.9 billion in external borrowing.
According to the same analysis of government guarantee data, the net outstanding balance of guarantees issued by September 30, 2025 was approximately EGP 5.29 trillion. The National Authority for Tunnels and Egyptian National Railways accounted for around 13%, equivalent to guaranteed obligations approaching EGP 675 billion. This is a measure of guarantees, not an additional total to be added to the earlier balances. The railways’ historic debts and their settlement, alongside new borrowing for fleet renewal, infrastructure and signalling, remain part of a broader financing picture whose accounts need to be distinguished from road expenditure.
In its review of the minister’s statements, Matsda2sh cited observations by the Central Auditing Organization for 2024/2025 indicating that the Finance Ministry had paid approximately EGP 38.7 billion in debt principal and interest that the National Authority for Tunnels could not pay. According to that source, the observation illustrates how some transport authorities’ obligations affect the public treasury. It does not mean that the money was spent on roads or that it should be added again to the debt and guarantee balances already cited.
What would a safer system require?
The expert proposes the Safe System approach used in several countries. It rests on five main areas: safe speeds, safe road use, safe vehicles, safe roads and an effective post-crash response. He says studies of its application have found reductions in deaths and injuries of 30% to 40%, while some countries and cities have approached zero deaths in specific areas. Those percentages remain his cited estimates for different experiences, rather than a guaranteed forecast of what implementation would achieve in Egypt.
He argues that Egypt’s performance can be assessed against the international standards in WHO’s Global Status Report on Road Safety, which, in his reading, identifies gaps between Egyptian policies and practices and those standards.
One of the most significant gaps, he says, concerns speeds in areas with many pedestrians. He cites international research recommending no more than 30 kilometres per hour in residential areas and around places of worship, hospitals, schools and universities. In some such areas, he says, the lowest speed proposed by the General Traffic Department in material he has reviewed is 50 kilometres per hour. A recommended safe speed around pedestrians must be distinguished from a general legal limit: WHO’s 2023 profile records a general maximum urban speed of 60 kilometres per hour, with the possibility of local modification.
The problem is not limited to regular maintenance, he adds. It also concerns basic safety equipment. He points to the absence of seat belts from many minibus seats and some means of transport operating under state oversight. In his view, that leaves large numbers of road users without the minimum safety protections internationally recognised as necessary.
The expert links part of the problem to economic pressures. Better safety equipment can raise vehicle prices, while financial difficulties can encourage owners to postpone maintenance or replacement of essential components. He cites the recent Dahab–Nuweiba crash, around which a possible tyre problem was raised, as an example in discussing maintenance pressures. Delayed maintenance does not, he says, necessarily mean drivers deliberately endanger themselves or others. The reference to a tyre issue is not presented here as a final finding of the Dahab investigation, but as the example he used in that discussion.
He adds that broader international commitments must be accompanied by measurable implementation. WHO’s 2023 Egypt profile records participation in two of the seven core United Nations road safety conventions. That is a dated description based on the profile’s data, not a daily update of every treaty’s status. For the African charter, the African Union list dated May 22, 2026 remains the specific time-bound reference for Egypt not appearing among the parties, as explained earlier.
He concludes that continued increases in crashes and casualties cannot be explained by individual drivers’ mistakes alone. They also reflect what he describes as “structural and policy mistakes or problems in the way road safety is managed in Egypt.”
The figures show why Egypt’s road safety crisis cannot be reduced to one crash or one driver’s error. Years of substantial investment in new and wider roads and network upgrades have still left thousands killed or injured annually. Deaths rose again in 2025 after falling the previous year, while officially identified dangerous locations continued to appear on the same roads or nearby stretches.
While the government presents improvements in road quality rankings as evidence of successful infrastructure projects, casualty figures show that engineering quality alone cannot measure safety. A safe road limits the consequences of human error, protects pedestrians, passengers and workers, and is used by vehicles that are maintained and inspected. Speeds must be monitored, and hazardous locations addressed before they become the sites of mass-casualty crashes.
