Putting New Cairo’s state-of-the-art monorail to the test

🚉 The new monorail line, or at least the portion now open to the public, is short but sweet. Only 16 out of 22 stops on the Eastern portion are now functional, starting with El Moshir Tantawy Station in New Cairo and ending at Justice City Station in the New Capital. End to end, the trip took a little under an hour to complete vs. around an hour and half by car depending on traffic. Because you are significantly elevated above street level, you get a rare bird’s eye view of Cairo’s urban sprawl and the expansive New Capital from the comfort of a fast, air-conditioned train.

The monorail has been six years in the making. Back in 2019, an Alstom -led consortium composed of Orascom Construction and Arab Contractors signed the USD 4.5 bn contract to design, construct, operate, and maintain the monorail, and construction began soon after. Cairo’s monorail line is also the longest in the world and the first ever driverless train in Africa.

The project is impressively modern. From clear signage to accessibility, the monorail system feels like a big leap forward for public transit in Cairo. Though still largely empty, signs, maps, and automated PA announcements at stations make it easy for first-time commuters to figure out where to go and what to do.

Don’t expect to find parking outside the stations. We arrived at El Moshir Tantawy Station by car, which is so far the only realistic way to start the journey. We found a small cluster of private vehicles dropping people off and picking people up. We noted roughly six parked cars guarded by an unofficial parking attendant underneath the stairs leading up to the station with very little room for additional cars to park.

Getting up to the station is simple. Take the stairs, escalator, or elevator up to the main platform, which is squeaky clean and reminiscent of Cairo International Airport when it was new. Once you walk through the guarded doorway and metal detector into the enclosed and air-conditioned section of the station, you can either wait in line to purchase a ticket from a ticket booth or secure one from one of two digital kiosks that were undergoing maintenance at the time of our visit.

Routes are clearly mapped and labelled, with signage indicating price tiers for tickets depending on the distance covered:

EGP 20 for 5 stations;
EGP 40 for 10 stations;
EGP 55 for 15 stations;
EGP 80 for 22 stations.

Half-price tickets are available for members of the armed forces, police, war veterans, senior citizens aged 60+, and people with disabilities. There are also options for weekly, monthly, and quarterly subscriptions that can slash ride prices by up to 50%.

A large number of ushers are there to help, for now. After scanning our QR-coded ticket at the automated gates, we were guided by a small army of Orascom/Alstom attendants to our designated platform located up another flight of stairs or escalators. Multiple screens indicate expected wait times before the arrival of the three nearest trains, which arrive every 10 minutes. Luckily we only had to wait for four minutes before the automated glass doors swung open and we were ushered into the monorail.

The trains are composed of four cabins, each equipped with 18 seats — there’s also ample room for standing in the center of each cabin, where you’ll find 24 ceiling-mounted handles in addition to eight vertical steel rails that can be used for stability while riding.

The ride was for the most part silent and smooth, but some sections of the track felt bumpier than others. It took about 3-5 minutes of travel time between stations. If you need to get some work done or hop on a call while riding, it is possible to do so — at no point during the commute do you lose cell service.

A joyride through New Cairo’s Road 90. On the weekday afternoon that we test-rode the monorail, most of our fellow passengers, who included some retirees and school children, appeared to be there because, like us, they were curious and wanted to try out Cairo’s newest mode of transport. The only group that appeared to have been using the monorail for a functional purpose was a handful of men dressed in suits who boarded the train heading west from the New Capital’s Government District.

But that could all change once the monorail is complete and properly integrated into the rest of Cairo’s public transit infrastructure. The full monorail system includes a 57-km line connecting the New Capital with East Cairo and a 42-km line connecting West Cairo with Giza. Practically speaking, that means commuters will eventually be able to take a monorail from Sixth of October City to Mohandeseen, change to take Metro Line 3, get off at Cairo Stadium Station, and then take the monorail to New Cairo or the New Capital. When complete, the two lines will have the capacity to transport 45k passengers per hour in each direction.