By Simon Willis According to a report in the weekly magazine Al-Musawwar of December 2017...wait a minute. I do apologise. I bought the magazine in...erm...December last year and put it in the proverbial safe place. You know the ‘safe place'. It is so safe that you cannot find anything. And four months later, hey presto! There it is. Where was I? Ah yes: raking up the past. Take 2: According to a report in the weekly magazine Al-Musawwar of December 2017, Egyptian Minister of Transport Hesham Arafat has been looking for new sources of revenue. If Mr Arafat were UK rail supremo, the job of finding more dosheroonies would be as easy as ABC. (A) Commission a bogus report on ticket revenues on the one hand, and maintenance and operating costs on the other. (B) Cut staff such as drivers and guards (people with paramedic qualifications who revive passengers who have heart failures and/or convulsions on being told they have to pay a penalty fare because they got on the wrong train). Cuts should be made with the excuse of delivering a leaner, more efficient to the travelling public. (C) Announce that from the first of January next year that all rail fares will be increased by 3 per cent, i.e. in line with inflation and to ensure that executive staff will have fat bonuses by June next year. Some may grumble in interviews with the media in the concourse of London stations. There might even be a protest with placards and banners proclaiming "Unfare!" and the usual platitudes about people before profit. Such spellings either serve as an indictment of the National Curriculum or bear testimony to the British sense of humour vis-a-vis orthography, in which case three cheers for the National Curriculum for promoting creativity. Protestors might turn nasty. Yes! A barista might be looked at in a funny way while she is serving a cardboard cup of brown liquid masquerading as coffee. Someone might throw a timetable at the television screen when the rail chief is called upon by the BBC to justify the price hikes. Yes! It'll be that bad. And then every commuter, everyone who uses the railways will pay up the extra 3 per cent until the next rise – a snip at 6 per cent as of January 1 the year after. But that's UK. No such affliction would occur here. Mr Arafat is said to have mooted the possibility of suspending the operations of one of the Metro lines. Imagine the repercussions of such a stoppage. The millions who use, say, the El-Marg-Helwan line every day would be forced not only to use overground bus services, but also pay up to five times the cost of an underground ticket (LE2). As soon as the word gets around that Metro ‘refugees' are desperate for transport, more sardine cans on wheels in various states of repair ranging from unroadworthy to four-wheeler death trap will clog the streets during Cairo's perpetual rush hour. Plan B: Ticket charges could be based on the number of stops. From Soraya El-Qubba to Maadi (18 stops) LE10, as opposed to Manshiyet El-Sadr-El-Shohada (4 stops) LE4.50. (Those are my estimates.) What about change? Few kiosks or shops are prepared to give you change, giving rise to Stupid Question No. 457: ‘Have you go the other LE1.50?' Of course, you don't! Even if you did, you're not going to give up precious change in anticipation of another tradesperson who doesn't have any change. Why should you? It's the seller's responsibility to ensure the availability of change. All right, then, it's up to you, the hapless passenger or traveller that must do the rounds of nearby shops and kiosks in the quest of change for a LE50. But put fare prices up across the board? Charge everyone LE5 for a ticket any distance? Je ne crois pas! Remember the bread riots of 8-19 January 1977, the IntifadDatul-khubz, when "hundreds of thousands of lower-class people" took to the streets to protest the lifting of state subsidies on basic foodstuffs as instructed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. It was reported that 79 people were killed and over 550 injured during the spontaneous uprising that ended with the deployment of the army and the re-instatement of subsidies. Note that usually representatives of the filthy-rich nations, who have precious little understanding of economic realities outside their exclusive little club, impose impractical solutions for perennial problems in a bid for swift repayments of loans with concessional terms, i.e. all sorts of strings attached embedded in the fine print...somewhere. No. A blanket increase in the Metro fare would be unthinkable, even though one ticket to travel from Zone 1-3 of the London Underground system costs £4.90 (LE112.40), or a standard one-way ticket in Paris will set you back a mere 3 euros (LE60). It's all relative, you might say. Salaries and the coat of living in UK and France are considerably higher than in Egypt. However, the Londoner and the Parisian will meekly stomach another price hike and not make a fuss. Mr Arafat mentioned the possibility of selling off scrap metal in the form of disused rolling stock, spare parts and rails. The London Metal Exchange says the going rate per tonne of ferrous scrap is $295. Think of that. Consider the pylons and rails that served the soon-to-be-defunct Heliopolis tramway and the sale thereof that could bring in millions to offset transport sector debt. Meanwhile, practically all the Merghany route has been taken up and the road widened accordingly. The sale of scrap might be a stop-gap measure, but such an initiative indicates a departure from conventional thinking that results in making the consumer or traveller pay more for less. Besides, what if Egypt could make its own rolling stock, produce rails, and transmission supports? Think of the numbers of real jobs created. Maybe Egypt could break into the export market for railway equipment.
