Mapping Movement with Transport for Cairo
The taxi drops me off at Transport for Cairo’s (TfC) office in Maadi on a Sunday morning in June. On my way into the building, I notice a couple of bicycles next to the parked cars. My assumption that these belong to the TfC team members is confirmed when I later spot several helmets in the office; I begin to question my transportation of choice.
Transport for Cairo is a knowledge consultancy that was co-founded in 2015 by a group of partners including urban data scientist Mohamed Hegazy and architect and urbanist Abdelrahman Hegazy. Their goal was clear: to improve mobility in a mega-city like Cairo. Their first big data collection project took place in 2017-2018 and saw the publication of their first print transit map, which is, in their own words, a “diagrammatic representation of the public transportation network in reality.”
Second Metro Map 2020 | Image: Transport for Cairo
Figuring out how people get around the Greater Cairo region is no small feat. With over 20 million inhabitants, it is the most populated area in Egypt and the continent, making it more difficult to follow and measure people’s movements, especially those using informal transit modes such as micro-buses. In fact, TfC’s research reveals that these informal modes account for 65% of public transport in the city. I met with Abdelrahman Hegazy as well as Sara Abu Henedy, an architect and urban planner, to understand how exactly they achieve this task.
The short answer is transport mapping. It’s a process that consists of tracking how people move geospatially and statistically with the aim of understanding current networks of transport, visualizing this data, and making it accessible to communities. But how can one translate an agile transportation system into a pattern with structured data?
“The road reveals the state of society,” declares Hegazy. By understanding how they operate literally on the ground, TfC is trying to help individuals and decision makers optimize the use and function of public transport.
TfC’s innovation isn’t just in the transportation maps themselves, but equally - if not more so - in their mapping process. “It’s resource utilization with great results,” Hegazy explains. By collecting data with limited resources (they started out by using open-source tools), their method is replicable. Other African cities can benefit from such cost-effective solutions, such as Addis Ababa, the first international city for whom they mapped transportation.
So what does transportation mapping look like in practice? It consists of two steps: data collection and data analysis. The first relies on a group of collectors who will gather quantitative and qualitative data. For a period that can range from two weeks to five months depending on the scope of the project, these collectors will ride the different lines of, say, buses. From the beginning to the end of its journey, noting each stop, and the number of passengers on each stop, etc. Each collector rides about 4 to 6 lines a day and feeds the data into Routelab, a data collection tool. Interestingly, TfC insists on having both genders equally represented in the collector team in order to more accurately capture everyone’s experience in public transport. This desire to reflect people’s experiences is materialized in the qualitative data gathered through surveys that the collectors conduct.
And what about bias? For the quantitative data, they try to increase the frequency of rides and, if necessary, update data if there are major changes made to a line or at the request of a client. For the qualitative data, they aim to interview a wide spectrum of society both on and off the road, and account for any discrepancies. One such example is class; I’m informed that those from wealthier neighborhoods are often reluctant to be interviewed.
After the field work comes step two. Cleaning and processing the data for quality assurance, followed by its analysis. The team generates statistics using scripts written in Python and R to identify trends before eventually visualizing this data in their print maps.
Header image & above: 6th of October Transit Map, the first transit map of a city in Cairo and includes multiple modes of transport. | Image: Transport for Cairo
The decision to make print maps the final output was motivated by a desire to make the maps as readable and accessible as possible. “We don’t have a culture of reading maps in Egypt,” states Abu Henedy. So striking a balance between global map standards and the current maps in Egypt was a challenge for the team. They tested different map models before eventually settling on a specific design and color code. And the effort was worth it. While they don’t measure their projects’ success, both admit they feel pride when noticing a random passenger using their metro map at a station or hear their friends are relying less on cars.
As I make my way down from their eighth-floor office, I think about what their work is doing for mobility in Cairo, as well as other cities. From raising awareness on the different modes of transport available to making sense of an informal system, TfC is rewriting the story of Cairo’s urban mobility. “We put it on the map,” I remember Hegazy saying proudly.
This blog is part of a series on innovation mapping which explores different types of mapping initiatives in Egypt.
by Aida Youssef, RISE Communications Associate