This research focus on infromal transport in Greater Cairo and its effect on access to opportunities.
Accessibility is defined in this context as “the ease with which activities may be reached from a given location using a particular transportation system” (Morris, Dumble, and Wigan 1979). Accessibility is considered essential to the economic prosperity of cities. Alain Bertaud theorized that the efficiency of cities depends on the extent to which the labor market is fragmented; the high operating costs in large cities is justified by the increased efficiency of a unified labor market (Bertaud 2004). Better access improves economic interactions between firms and increases competition by reducing distance barriers, allowing a wider talent pool into the labor market (Venables, Laird, and Overman 2014).
On the individual level, poor accessibility has been theorized to restrict life paths (Hägerstrand 1970), and to limit employment opportunities by limiting the potential for networking capital (Urry 2012). Higher accessibility has been directly associated with social inclusion (Stanley and Vella-Brodrick 2009) and improved psychological wellbeing (Delbosc 2012). Better accessibility is also correlated with an increase in public transport mode share (Cui and El-Geneidy 2019). This means that focusing on improving public transport can be the solution to the congestion in the GCR. Given that traffic volumes on most of the road network is above the road capacities and forecasted to increase (“Cairo Traffic Congestion Study - Phase 2” 2013), an informed understanding of how the different public transport modes contribute to accessibility is necessary.
There are various accessibility measures that are suited to different purposes. Measures of accessibility that are useful on an operational level are those that are able to compare the number of opportunities within a certain cost threshold of different residential locations (Wachs and Kumagai 1973). Integral measures are well suited for this purpose and so are popular in transport analysis (Makrí and Folkesson 2000). Two particular integral measures were considered for this analysis: Gravity Measures and Cumulative Opportunity Measures. The Cumulative Opportunities Measure is chosen as it is (a) clear and easy to communicate (Koenig 1980; Handy and Neimeier 1997), and (b) grounded in the work of Bertaud (2014) on the effective size of labor markets.