Noorhan Mahmoud has spent years struggling to travel within Port Said and beyond it. Public transport in the governorate is poorly suited to the wheelchair she uses, leaving her dependent on taxis and ride-hailing services whose higher costs add to her daily expenses.
A para table-tennis player, she travels to Cairo for competitions. When she takes the train with a friend who also uses a wheelchair, both struggle to board. Without suitable station equipment, they must ask employees or fellow passengers to lift their chairs into the carriage.
Mahmoud sought an adapted car using her integrated-services card, but says it has remained held at customs for two years. She continues to incur storage charges without progress on release. She says her Takaful and Karama benefit has also stopped.
She wants Port Said to have accessible buses like the limited number introduced in Cairo, with space for powered wheelchairs, appropriate boarding ramps and acceptance of the integrated-services card for a half-price ticket. “These are basic rights for people with disabilities,” she tells Zawia3. “Providing them on public transport would relieve much of the daily hardship we experience in Port Said.”
Abdel-Nasser Diab began using a wheelchair five years ago after developing paraplegia. Reaching Cairo’s metro stations has become a challenge in itself: poor paving, pavement obstructions and vehicles, particularly tuk-tuks parked at entrances and exits, obstruct his route.
Once inside, stairs and escalators are unusable for him if the lift is absent or out of service. He also struggles to board crowded trains safely and says gaps between platforms and carriages need practical solutions. Similar boarding difficulties occur on the railway.
“The solutions are clear and used in many countries,” Diab says. “A designated door for wheelchair users could have a movable ramp, making boarding and alighting easier while protecting their independence.”
He calls for accessible routes around stations, removal of obstructions at entrances and ramps allowing wheelchair users to enter and leave trains safely.
Ali Abdel-Fattah experienced major transport difficulties while living in Minya. He has severe weakness in his arms and moderate weakness in his legs, which affect movement and balance. After moving to Cairo, he encountered regional railway stations without lifts, forcing him to use long pedestrian tunnels or high footbridges that caused exhaustion and threatened his safety.
In Cairo, he relies on the metro, which he finds more accessible than other transport. Nevertheless, he wants dedicated assistance, wheelchairs available when needed and better ticket concessions for passengers and companions. He says he has been charged two full train fares for himself and a companion, and argues that both should receive a half-price fare.
Changing metro lines can require long walks inside stations, he adds, which are particularly difficult for passengers with severe mobility impairments who do not have wheelchairs. He also describes a shortage of accessible parking in central Cairo, shopping areas and the al-Azhar and al-Hussein area.
Amani Amin says the metro’s accessible facilities may look adequate but are undermined by their operation and passengers’ behaviour. Seats reserved for disabled and older passengers are often occupied by younger riders, leaving her without a seat despite her mobility impairment. She frequently avoids requesting one because she does not want an argument or embarrassment.
She also describes crowding at lifts, where faster-moving passengers enter before people who need more time to reach the doors. “The simplest right is to sit in the places reserved for us without a struggle,” she says. Seats near doors are especially important for safe alighting.
Accessibility, Amin argues, requires more than installing a lift or marking a seat. It also needs respectful behaviour and supervision so that those who need facilities can use them.
For blind passengers, the journey starts with an unsafe pavement
Researcher Logina Abdel-Mawla, an assistant project manager at the NADA Foundation for Safer Egyptian Roads, describes another set of obstacles for blind and partially sighted travellers. Missing or damaged pavements and traders’ encroachments force people into traffic, while inadequate pedestrian crossings leave them dependent on others to cross roads.
She recently worked on a project with the Global Youth Coalition for Road Safety examining mobility barriers for blind and partially sighted people and raising awareness of their experiences.
Abdel-Mawla says the metro is widely used by this group but that accessibility is better on Line 3 than on the older lines. At some stations, she says, disability-concession tickets are available at only one counter, and tactile ground markings that help passengers follow routes and identify platform edges are missing.
The project also found that social attitudes can undermine safety. Some people avoid using white canes because they fear identifying themselves as vulnerable to theft. Others receive well-intentioned but unsafe assistance from passers-by who do not know how to help.
Accessibility means making the built environment, transport, information and services usable by people with different disabilities. Egypt’s engineering accessibility code is commonly identified as Code 601. Its existence does not, by itself, demonstrate compliance at every station, on every vehicle or along the route connecting a person’s home to transport.
Equipment is only one part of the solution
Disability and early-intervention specialist Yasmine Mattar, associated with the National Council for Persons with Disabilities, believes roads and transport require substantial improvements. She points to unsafe road conditions and driving behaviour that put disabled pedestrians at risk, including people using crutches or walking slowly without wheelchairs.
Mattar says pavements often lack suitable ramps, while trees and commercial obstructions block wheelchair routes. Such barriers deny people independent, safe passage.
She describes the features an accessible bus should provide: a lowered boarding level or ramp, space to secure a wheelchair, protection against movement during travel, appropriate support and a stop-request button within reach of a seated passenger. Having passengers lifted manually, she argues, compromises independence.
At metro and railway stations, stairs, unsuitable slopes and absent lifts can make travel difficult or impossible. Mattar says some ramps are too steep or poorly designed for safe use.
She also criticises intrusive assistance. Touching disabled women without their consent under the pretext of helping, she says, violates their dignity and autonomy. Assistance should follow the person’s wishes, rather than assumptions about what they need.
Disability-inclusion consultant Rasha Ernest, who herself has a mobility impairment, says many public transport services remain inaccessible and the accessible options are limited or difficult to use. Some wheelchair-accessible buses operate, she notes, but their geographic reach is narrow and provision for blind passengers is insufficient. Outside Cairo, people may have little choice but to hire private vehicles.
A wheelchair user may board at a metro station with a lift and arrive at one without a usable lift, Ernest says. Crowding and inadequate measures for blind passengers add to the difficulty, particularly on older lines.
“Assistance is often offered out of pity, without asking the person how to help,” Ernest tells Zawia3. “That can cause harm or restrict movement.” She adds that intrusive questions and assumptions that every disabled person needs a permanent companion violate privacy and reinforce stereotypes.
She says accessible pavements are concentrated in limited areas, while missing ramps and obstructions elsewhere force wheelchair users among moving vehicles. Audible guidance, pavement design and staff cooperation are interconnected requirements; one cannot compensate for the absence of the others.
Ernest recognises important steps in legislation and some newer transport projects, but says implementation remains small relative to the scale of transport networks across Egypt. She also questions whether renovations at major railway stations serving governorates such as Luxor and Aswan have adequately considered disabled travellers.
Her immediate, relatively inexpensive priority is training transport staff to assist people appropriately. Longer-term planning, she says, must listen to people with different disabilities and extend across all governorates.
Uneven routes, incomplete information
Doaa Mabrouk, executive director of the Baseera Foundation for rehabilitation and inclusion of people with visual impairments, says accessibility has improved in recent years but remains below the needs of passengers and the protections envisaged in Law No. 10 of 2018 on the rights of persons with disabilities.
She identifies missing audible guidance, difficult-to-identify controls and insufficient tactile markings inside vehicles. Drivers and conductors, she says, are often not trained in safe assistance.
Some new metro lines provide tactile routes, but these may be incomplete or disconnected, she says. On buses, the absence of audible route announcements makes identifying the correct service difficult. Minibuses and shared vans present particular challenges because passengers depend on informal shouted destinations and may struggle to board.
Railway passengers can face inadequate audible information and tactile platform routes, alongside difficulties identifying platform and carriage numbers.
Mabrouk says the environment around transport is equally important. Uneven pavements, poorly organised stops and crossings without audible signals prevent independent travel even where the vehicle itself is usable.
She regards Greater Cairo and Alexandria as relatively better served because investment and newer projects are concentrated there. Elsewhere, she attributes limited progress to weak oversight, insufficient training and poor coordination between transport and infrastructure agencies.
Accessibility rules already exist, she says, but implementation is inconsistent. She criticises the lack of systematic checks on private minibuses and shared vans and calls for effective accessibility assessment before licensing.
The 2022 national disability survey published by CAPMAS estimated that 11% of the population had functional difficulties ranging from “some difficulty” to inability to perform an activity. It reported 12.1% in urban areas and 10.1% in rural areas, and 11.4% among females compared with 10.6% among males.
An accessible station needs an accessible route to it
Hassan Mahdi, professor of road and transport engineering at Ain Shams University, argues that many urban roads fail to provide the basic conditions pedestrians need, even before considering disability-specific adaptations. Pavement encroachments make the situation harder for everyone and especially for disabled users.
“Transport accessibility has two complementary sides,” he says: a safe, equipped pavement and a culture of respecting designated facilities inside public transport. He calls for usable ramps, reliable lifts and bus stops that allow vehicles to align safely with the boarding area.
Mahdi says improvements require infrastructure investment, consistent standards and respect for disabled passengers’ rights.
Shehab Abu Zeid, policy adviser and programmes director at NADA, sees implementation rather than the absence of written codes as the principal problem. Existing standards need to be applied continuously across the whole transport journey.
He argues that infrastructure has historically prioritised private motorists while marginalising pedestrians, cyclists, children, older people, blind passengers and wheelchair users. Individual accessible projects can become isolated islands if people cannot safely reach them.
Some stations meet standards while others on the same network do not, he says. Evaluations should therefore draw on direct users’ experiences, including the interviews and field questionnaires carried out by the foundation.
Abu Zeid identifies five obstacles: delays in updating Egyptian codes, weak enforcement, centralised decisions concentrating provision in a few cities or neighbourhoods, insufficient organised public pressure, and a shortage of detailed data about different disabilities and their geographic distribution.
He calls for regular updates to standards, clear and binding implementation mechanisms, work across all governorates, stronger civic participation and data that can support targeted planning.
Lawyer Ismail Rizk, who works on disability-related legal matters, says the legal framework contains valuable protections but criticises what he regards as overly general provisions and insufficient clarity about implementation, funding and oversight. He acknowledges provisions on accessible roads, boarding areas and public facilities, while stressing that they have not been fully implemented.
The experiences described in this report reveal an uneven system: improvements in some newer projects coexist with missing links in everyday journeys. Accessible vehicles, stations and pavements must work together, and staff and passengers must respect the independence of those using them.
Accessibility is a right essential to dignity, safety and participation. Making it effective requires coordinated planning, operation, enforcement and training, developed with the people whose daily lives depend on it.
