Ahmed Morsy listens to both sides of the story Statistics point out that, in Greater Cairo alone, there are no less than 50,000 taxis; how come it's so hard to find one to take you where you want to go? The streets are invariably swarming with the ubiquitous black- and-white vehicles, but try stopping one -- generally, a Cairo taxi will not stop until you have cried out your destination, and even then, more often than not nowadays, the vehicle will cruise right past you -- and you will immediately realise how difficult it actually is to travel by taxi in Cairo. Say your destination is to the driver's liking and he has stopped: if your journey is any distance at all, you must negotiate the fare beforehand -- a tedious process of indeterminate results. "These days," according to Hussein Karem, 25, who depends on taxis for daily transportation, "the taxi driver is a pasha. You have to yell out your destination to one, two, three taxis before someone will stop for you. The metre is always switched off..." Metre rates being outdated by far, it is up to the driver to estimate the real value of the journey, which Karem says is invariably exaggerated. A taxi will pick up more than one passenger on the way: "You shouldn't be too alarmed if you end up sharing a ride." Karem says you should always have enough change on you for when you pay up, especially on shorter journeys where you haven't agreed on the fare beforehand. "Any hesitation, any weakness -- like asking the driver whether he has change -- will result in a demand of extra money." Taxi drivers have their own complaints, however -- so much so that many of those interviewed by Al-Ahram Weekly are appealing to the relevant authorities to help relieve their burden. "We are meant to abide by the metre, which is usually turned off or 'broken'," says Ahmed Salah, 38. "If we were to stick with a base fee of 60 piastres and 10 piastres per km, however, we wouldn't even cover the cost of petrol." He explains that the rate depends, rather, on traffic, number of passengers and time of day, as well as destination: factors not always taken into account by the customer. Every single passenger makes a difference, Salah adds: "It's my daily bread that we're talking about. I want to be able to go home to my wife and children with money enough for the day, and that's why I have to choose my journeys carefully, why I can't say yes to every destination regardless of the traffic." While some taxi drivers are blessed with relatively new vehicles that help them survive the traffic, those with older vehicles, which cannot be officially registered, are engaged in a flourishing licence-plate black market: the "second-hand taxi market" has even come into view on Nasr Road. As Salah puts it, "instead of replacing an old vehicle with a new one, you simply replace the license plate..." The conflict between passengers and taxi drivers found comic expression in a recent promotion of a satellite channel under the slogan "Challenging boredom": the chubby superhero stops a taxi and is visibly upset by the driver's endless prattle and his taste in décor; this uber-stereotype of the Cairo taxi driver ends up in the middle of the desert hanging from a bow, a smouldering fire and cacti beneath him. Ibrahim Sayed, 29, is one taxi driver who was upset by this harsh critique: "Not all taxi drivers are the same, you know. Of course there are people like this among taxi drivers, but the same is also true of passengers..."
