The Definitive Guide to Living in the Capital , Cairo , Egypt

Featured image via Chronicle Live

If you’ve travelled around Europe or America, and opted to use their metro systems, you might have noticed something quite unusual. In a lot of countries, everything is done through machines. Perhaps you’d be interested to hear that not too far in the future, Cairo’s metro stations will have the same machines.

The Ministry of Finance, together with the Ministry of Transport and The National Authority for Tunnels, have contacted an international company specialising in exporting such machines. The machines will allow citizens to purchase tickets by inserting the required amount and receiving their tickets, there will also be a “change” feature, so if you don’t have the exact amount, the machine can then give you back change.

This effort comes to combat the huge growing queues at current ticket windows. The Ministry of Finance announced on Wednesday that it has sent a couple of different types of metro ticket to be tested on the machines abroad to prove its efficiency, ahead of agreeing on a contract to import and install a number of these machines in Egypt.

In addition, the Ministry also announced that it will import change machines to allow citizens to get the exact amount they need, this will come as the second step in the pilot project in which such a machine was installed in Al Shohada Metro Station.

While no exact official launch date has been set, it is expected that these machines will arrive before the end of the year to be tested before they are installed across most metro stations in Cairo.