Almost nothing in this atlas's Cairo record belongs to Cairo. Greater Cairo is three governorates under separate governors, Egypt is centralised to a degree that leaves a governorate with a directory page, and the systems that matter are owned above the city: the metro and the monorail by the Ministry of Transport through the National Authority for Tunnels, the air-quality network by the Ministry of Environment, the electricity meters by a state distribution company. The one entry the governorate genuinely owns is the one a Swiss foundation paid for. The second thing to know is that the numbers are missing. Nine candidates were source-checked for this city and four were rejected; of the six that stand, three carry no impact figures at all, because the figures in circulation contradict each other. Daily metro ridership is quoted at three, three and a half, four and a half and five million. Neither transport operator publishes anything.
The atlas documents 6 projects in Cairo, the earliest dating to 2013: 1 scaled back, 5 still running without a verdict. Every entry carries an evidence grade — the strongest here is independent (1 entry) — and links its sources.
Three entries that show what Cairo is actually doing.
Computed from the 6 entries below — a profile, not a score.
The instrument came first and then stopped. Contactless fare gates have run on metro lines 1 and 2 since 2013, which makes Cairo's the oldest of Africa's three fare cards — ahead of Kigali's Tap&Go in 2015 and Lagos's Cowry in 2021 — and passengers have tapped in and out against a distance band since the flat fare ended in May 2018, a change met with protests and arrests. Thirteen years on it is still only a metro card. No bank card, phone or QR opens a gate; the Visa terminals installed in December 2025 stand at the ticket counter. A single card spanning metro, monorail, light rail and buses was announced in November 2023 and again in November 2025, and does not exist.
Around 2019 and 2020 a cluster of instruments was legislated, financed and contracted, and most of it is still in transit. The interior ministry began issuing RFID windscreen stickers in June 2019; the reader layer that would make them a measurement system has never been shown to work, and no enforcement figure of any kind — violations, fines, cameras — has been published for Cairo. A waste-management law created a national regulator in October 2020 that licenses activities but registers almost nobody: about 2,000 of Greater Cairo's roughly 250,000 informal collectors. In September 2020 a US$200 million World Bank loan began upgrading the air-quality monitoring network for Cairo, Giza and Qalyubia, and that November a Japanese ODA loan bought 490,000 remote-read electricity meters for three districts of northern Cairo.
The city's own contribution arrived in 2022 and was paid for from Zurich. Cairo Bike is owned by Cairo Governorate, funded by the Drosos Foundation with UN-Habitat and supervised by ITDP — the first grant-funded scheme in this atlas's bike-share series, and a genuinely new answer to the question of who pays. It collapsed within weeks of its July 2022 start when the governorate cancelled the maintenance contract, was inaugurated again that October in the weeks before Egypt hosted COP27, stalled a second time, and reopened in September 2023 under a different operator. What the grant could not buy was the street: about two kilometres of protected lane were built against roughly fifteen planned.
Then delivery, late. The smart meters were to be operating by mid-2023 on the contractor's own schedule; installation began in Hadayek el-Qubba in April 2025. The monorail carried its first passengers on 6 May 2026 and reached all twenty-two stations on 27 June, running 56.5 km from Nasr City into the New Administrative Capital — which this atlas holds as a separate city, so the line qualifies here only because its Cairo stations opened in the second phase. Alstom states it runs unattended at GoA4. Nobody independent has confirmed that, and nobody reports staff aboard either, which puts Cairo in a position the atlas has not had before: not a claim contradicted, not a claim proven, but a claim nobody has checked.
On a time axis, by the year each one started — 2013 to 2026. Pick a dot to read what it was.
✔ Every published entry is checked against the public sources it cites before publication.
Editorial links between Cairo's own entries — the city as a system, not a list.
Plans and announced trajectories — not yet documented results.
Three things are sitting in in-trays. A graded response plan for the autumn smog season — the Delhi-style ladder where a measured threshold triggers enforceable duties — was drafted under the World Bank loan and was still awaiting Cabinet approval in January 2026; the Bank's own blog described it three months later in the present tense, as already switching measures on automatically. The unified transport card has been announced twice. The automated-enforcement law that would make the 2019 windscreen stickers mean something has not been shown to operate. Meanwhile the Bank rated its own project's implementation moderately unsatisfactory in April 2025, with none of twelve additional pollutant monitors installed. What would change this record most is not another system but a published number. Cairo's environment ministry and the World Bank give two different PM10 series for the same years — 128 to 88 micrograms per cubic metre on one account, 118 to 89 on the other. Both are reported by the parties running the programme. No Egyptian utility, ministry or transport operator found during this review publishes an open data feed, and the only machine-readable Cairo Metro timetable is an estimate a civic group released in 2016 under a non-commercial licence.
Where Cairo appears in the atlas's own analysis.
One city the atlas reads next to Cairo — the reason first, then the entries it rests on. Chosen by hand from the Cairo threads below, not counted out of them.
Two African megacities tying bus, rail and ferry to a single card on very different networks — Cairo's came first and on its metro, Lagos's later and across more modes at once.
Every editorial link from Cairo's entries into another city, strongest first. Each one is a statement about two projects, not about two cities — the three above are the ones the atlas is willing to make at city level.
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Smart-city projects in Cairo, Egypt.” The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/cities/cairo/ (last verified 2026-08-14). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.