 All right. Good morning. Thank you for coming to our talk today. Now, I'm Mohamed Peguesi. I'm from Cairo, and I'm going to tell you about the work that you are doing in Cairo. Now, first of all, to sense some context, transportation is a problem in Cairo. It's not that easy to travel through the city. The way that you want to approach it is you want to understand what it is, what happens. So, we started looking for all available information on public transportation in the city. And this is really what you get. This is the most recent information that the Cairo Traffic Authority publishes. That's equivalent to transports for London, which is probably here for London. And it's a PDF of 20 pages. Let me walk you through a little bit of how it actually looks like. So, I took it and I did my work on it, and I put it in CSV. And this is what you get. Now, I think that the social element of the problem we have is working with government data and internet, where you really have it lucky here in Europe. If you look at the very left side, you will find that we have seven bus routes that are numbered number one. And you will notice that the difference between them is actually what is in the second column, the name of the symbol. There is number one dash, there is number one space, number one not for the name. Number one space dash, which is different from number one dash. And if you look at the route, it's open and I'm forgetting for that. But you'll find that all of these are basically the same, start and end, and just different things in the middle. Now, each word of these, or each collection of words between the dashes, is actually not a station or a stop. Now, this is an area in Cairo. So, if we were in Berlin, this would basically would say, Moabit, Kreuzberg, Neukölln. And that said, you're lucky that we're going to start with Michael, that's going to be the noise in the south, it's up to you. And then you find this entire confusion across 853 roads that don't really correspond to 853 routes. I do not know how many public bus routes operate in the city by a single public or solid responsibility. Assumptions go from 400 to 800. I've been working on this for the last 10 minutes. Let me show you another piece of information. One last bit. This is actually the only public information that's available. And this is the most recent one. It's from April 2010. So, we also have problems time with us. Going to more recent information, this is from 2015. This is not public, but this is the list of all the licensed micro buses. So, to put it into context, we have a metro, we have the CTA, Cairo Traffic Authority, operating public buses. These are regulated micro buses, and these are the ones that are actually licensed. And then we have a whole lot of other unregulated, unlicensed ones. And you find that we have 19,500 of these unregulated micro buses operating. So, this is really the scale of the system. As a user in the streets, that's the kind of information that you see if you get to find it. This is an ATABA. ATABA is one of the most central stations in central Cairo. So, it would be equivalent to how Pamov here in Berlin or to King's Cross in London. And these are the public bus signs that start with it. So, you see that we really have a problem with information. So, what do we do? We are a team. We work all time for Cairo. And this is half of our team with a couple of attendees that have been event that we threw this March in time. This was actually an open day today. We are the ones who organized it. Because what we try to do is gather information on all of this public transportation system in Cairo and release it as open data to be able to start working on top of it. So, now I will guide you on the process that we do and the troubles that we face. This is the old SMB's map for Cairo. To give you a very simple orientation, the space in the middle that goes is basically the 9 and you have the right side which is Cairo and the left side which is Giza, greater Cairo area, 20 million people. The first problem that we face is that the base map itself is very, very bad. Now, yeah, it looks good and it covers all the streets that's true, but the metadata of it is bad. In the sense of most of these roads are designated as highways where people are not allowed to move on it. So, when you open Google Maps and you try to have a route in this area, you can't really walk in Cairo because ah, I have a status, you can't meet and this does not correspond to reality. So, this is the first problem. The input data that we have from all of them is already not very realistic. What we do is then we try to write each bus from the very beginning to the very end and map it using mobile technology. This is 9-1044, which I took as an example for today and it starts from here in the south, from the Neve all the way up to the airport. These are 37 kilometers and we just tried it from the beginning to that. So, the station we do is that we actually map it, we map how much time it takes, we map where it stops and the way that it works in Cairo is that you can act out the driver wherever you want, I want to stop and he stops and we don't really have bus stops in Cairo, not in the entire city, so that's the system. We map that and we actually find a lot of stops that exist that are permanent and a lot of them that are impermanent. So, in the next step we overlay the suggested stops that we have which do not directly correspond to the ones that we actually map on the ground. Why? You will find that here we have two times where the bus actually stops 250 meters of each other. Yeah, we have only one stop here. You find other times where it didn't stop at all so you see, is there a reason to stop or not? All of the structure is a highway so it only stops one time in the middle of the highway for a certain reason, but still this is the only stop that we actually consider. So, we need to work between assumptions and between reality because we continue to fit reality within the assumptions. The final step is to make it legible and to make it actually usable for people. So, we designed these beautiful looking maps we name these stations because they actually don't have real names and then we put it in a database to make it machine reader. So, this is the schema that we made for the demonstration purposes of GTFS. GTFS is general transit feed system. Previously, Google transit feed system. Started in 2005. By 2010 it had developed as a standard worldwide. Everybody used it. And it was only in 2014 that a project called Digital Matatos in Nairobi tried to implement a standard on a surgical standard on an informal transportation system such as ours that's not as regulated and as well organized here in Europe. So, you get all sorts of data in it and then you can represent it in a trip routing application. This is how Google Maps would work if we had data in Cairo. It would give you the name of the stops. It would give you the name of the bus that you have to take with the metro line, the time it takes to move between the stops, how much you need to work and everything. So, that's really our end result that we want to get there. But now let's get to the real interesting part. Can we really apply GTFS on Cairo? Well, the first question is really what is a stop? So, let's take a look at this picture. This is actually me being irresponsible because I'm driving on the corner and won't be in the camera. Because I am in the middle of a highway driving at 90 kilometers and these are people standing in the middle of a highway that connects Cairo to Shenzhen. And this is the public bus that stops 40 people that are standing there every day to pick them up in the middle of the highway. Because this highway intersects with another road and they are not connected. And the people from the other road get on top of the highway by a set of ladders that they built themselves to use the public bus to reach their workplace and education and healthcare. So, I am convinced of a stop. Do I put a stop on the middle of a highway or not? In this case, we actually decided to because it's a permanent stop and we want to reach from that particular area Cairo or Shenzhen city this is your gateway. Let's take another one. This is in the middle of Cairo. This is an exception citizen and he is waiting for a bus. This is a bus stop. And this is as permanent as a bus stop as it gets. I promise you, go to that bus stop and within one minute the bus will come and pick you up. It really works. It's a normal journey but in real life use it's a straight to a bus stop and it's very reliable. If I go to ask somebody where do I take a bus to go to Giza they're going to point me to there. So again, this is a permanent stop. But then I have to make a distinction between other stops that are not really permanent. And I need to distinguish between those and actual bus stops which have signs. This is the kind of work that we do. And it makes the assumptions stop. But let's go to another one. What is even a route? Remember when I told you we have 6,000 public buses 15,000 registered buses? Well, these are part of the third line. These are part of the estimated 40 to 80,000 buses that we have that are unlicensed and unregulated. These are downright ridiculous because they are licensed here as a private vehicle but they are a public bus system basically. They are a very big part of the system nowadays. These are in Atalab which is the main station that I mentioned earlier right in the middle of Cairo right next to the Atalab police station. So you see that the illegal and the illegal has intermixed in Egypt but to form a system. And these are actually sometimes very permanent lines. This is in Azhar. Azhar is like the Bazaar in Cairo and it connects to the Atalab and you go there, you stand and within a minute one of these small ones like you see that they are fighting with the same customer will come and stop and take you. So this is as permanent a system as it gets as alive as taking an underground it's always going to be there but it's illegal and it's unregulated and it has no number and it's informal. So again, we need to distinguish between those then you'll find all the particular stories that are associated. Remember the highway I showed you earlier, the one connecting Cairo to Shifzaiyat? Well the other road below is actually a ruler road and people reach these highways by taking these cars which are called Boxer Fayoum. They're called Box because this is actually a truck and it was in the box behind with the ones that inside. And on the intern only people from Fayoum are allowed to drive these buses. There is no legal laws speculating that or this exists the way it is, exists the custom of it. And all these cars are licensed from Fayoum but they drive in particular parts in rural Cairo. So you'll find that it's actually an anthropological study as well of what we are doing to understand why the system works the way it is. This is another difference between us and different people for instance. It's very visible but if you look you'll find that there are all sorts of stuff written here all sorts of sticker put on a brand new bus that's maybe three months old and public. And the ones who put those are actually the drivers themselves and they're not like people going at night and spaying graffiti and hoping not to get caught. Why? Because this is actually a reality in Egypt that drivers have a lot of leeway over how the bus system runs and the authorities are not really they don't really organize it as well as they should do. They don't really put out information like we saw earlier. And throughout Egypt if there is a problem with the bus if there is a service introduction it falls down to the drivers to communicate and to deal with this. And then you find all sorts of interesting things that completely break away with any system. Again, try to make it closer. You have a bus you have two passengers sitting and you don't have a driver sitting in the front. Why is this so? Well, I am Muslim. This was during Friday prayers. And the way that we pray in Friday is that we go to the mosque, we listen to the speaks for 20 minutes and then we pray for five minutes. So that was during the speech and I find the bus coming to parking and the driver coming to listen to the speech and the bus is at its duty. During the time that this bus was parked there for about 20 minutes, two other buses on the same line passed and just continued. And then you will find that this is something that you continue to put in any system and this is in the official system. Never mind the similarities that happen in the unofficial system. But is it all bad? No, really, because this unofficial, this informality actually also solves a lot of problems and that's also defined in part of our research. This is a microbus because you have a license plate, so it's license. But this is not operating as a microbus in that particular instance. It's operating as a school bus. Look inside and you will find a lot of young girls wearing a white-haired scarf and going to another school at 8 in the morning. This bus goes every day to meet oppa, which is a poor neighborhood in Iran, picks these girls and drives them on the flat kilometers to their school. And it solves a very real community problem. So I get my children safe on time and affordable to school. In a system that works but has a lot of problems. And then you'll find that the informality is the same that actually comes to help people out and to solve their problems. So this is the presentation I wanted to give. Feel free to comment for any questions. And I actually wanted to leave the last 10 minutes of time for questions that you have. Thank you. That is a very good question. OK. I assume with the public bus routes that most of the time they take the same bus route because they are public and they are bound by a schedule. But then again I find a very real problem. We had we have a database from the web bank that gives us all the paper maps in GIS form for the public bus routes. We are collaborating with the web bank in fact. And then we found that these paper maps as recent as February 2015 have not accounted for particular loads in Cairo that have been closed since 2011. So you find that you have data that is official, that cannot be true. Of course they are going to change. And the same applies to the micro buses. If we go to this set of micro buses this list this list over here all of these routes are very deterministic. They say up to the level of the street that you have to take. But then you find in reality that you have these micro buses who are completely informer and where the driver can wake up in the morning and just decide if he is going to operate or not and on which route he is going to operate. And you find that this is a very flexible system because they never drive empty. They always wait in the station until they fill up. If they can't fill up, you will just go and find a different route to operate on. So it's actually a very efficient system in terms of load traffic. You will never find an easier route to find in Europe which is a public bus system operating for the empty. So you see it's a variation. Sometimes they are deterministic, sometimes they are most of the times deterministic and this is everything that we do. It's always the same. Sometimes the stop is always there. Sometimes they have a critical structure. Sometimes not. Do you collect data on basically taxis? Because it seems like there is a gray area between public transport and private transport that you have a lot of gray compared to the systems that I'm going to use to. For these things, for example, do they go off-route? If someone knows their number and they call these micro buses, will they go and do private trips? Are they acting as taxis? Or do you draw a line on-demands pickup and only do things that have predetermined routes? Or is there a gray area there as well? It's a gray area because this is licensed as a private vehicle. So if you know the driver, it's completely up to the discussion of the driver to operate. You will find that we have a lot of ownership. Some are part of a fleet where you have a fleet owner owning 60 vehicles and writing them out on day-to-day. And some belong to a government employee who takes it in the morning to his job. Somebody comes and picks it up, operates it for 6 hours and then brings it back. So again, it's a huge factor. In international development departments, they are referred to as shared taxis. So this is it again, it's a spectrum. One thing I'm really interested in is in my town of Portland, Oregon the city tried to stand up to Uber and say at least provide accessible transport for people that for example require a van that's equipped for a wheelchair transport. But it was under-specified and so a lot of people when they started using it had really high times to when they requested a wheelchair accessible Uber to when one actually showed up in certain cases like 9 hours. And so I'd really be interested in potentially comparing this data with mean trip time for people on certain ends of the transport spectrum because like you mentioned at the end of the talk that it's not all bad like you have a variety of different options and I'm interested if you're comparing public and private in that way in terms of efficiency versus like regulation and things like that. Exactly, we're also comparing like the coverage of the public system versus the private system and in the process we found that we can't just focus on the quantitative on the CSD side of it but we also have to look at the qualitative side of it because these cars are not ready to take on people with special needs people with disabilities. But then again you find that people with disabilities in particular because the drivers and the people sitting at the cars will find a way to help them out with so much more community experience and this is only the stuff that you will find with qualitative research. It's actually a very interesting part that I also want to add around which is the time that it ends. We don't have schedules for public buses in Cairo and we definitely won't have schedules for those because they already have the wish. So here what we do is we actually rely on interacting with like APIs on the internet to estimate travel times and then you find that for the same route like for the one that I showed at the very beginning in 1044 the time can increase by up to 60% over the course of the day over normal circumstances due to traffic. And again when you have this kind of variation forget about holding a schedule at that you can respect for and control the software. So again your face is a problem. How do I compile my reality with the data standard that has been developed standardize and is used all over the place now? Do you have any other questions? How do you plan? How do you plan to proceed? Do you think you'll ever manage to compile this case down to GTFS or not doing that? Yes. How do you plan? The first thing we need to do is we need to collect as much data as possible in a short time frame because I'm basically taking a picture of the figure of the city. And to do this we're working actually on applying for international grants with a couple of partners in Egypt that we've been collaborating with a lot of international development organizations to be able to map the entire city at once. We've mapped on our own we mapped 14 bus lines and a couple of micro bus lines and the metro. And Pablo's the metro has been data already and has been picked up by a couple of applications. But we are faced with up to 800 public bus lines and up to a thousand micro bus lines so we can't do that on our own. That's the first thing. The other thing is that we find it increasingly necessary to create our own tools because the tools that exist and a lot of startups in the city start with creating our tools to do this and create GTFS but they're not appropriate to our context because we don't have a standard of operating because of all these assumptions that we need to encode. So we find that we need to work on new tools and hopefully exchange the specifications of GTFS or expand it. And that's possible. It's an open standard. So it's basically these three parts getting the funding finding the things that are creating new tools and we're hopefully open source the ones that we created so far sometimes soon fixing the open standard or adapting the open standard to our needs. Do you actually cooperate with any other cities like do you have an exchange with other cities serving the same problem anywhere in the world or a future for some? Yes. So there are four cities worldwide that have tried to do what we did which is not an informal system and created as the latest GTFS around us. These are Bacca, Nairobi, Mexico City and Jakarta. We have, in addition to that like there's been some efforts in Amin recently and they released like a graphical map that we used for that's called mapping Amin. We have talked to them. There's an emerging effort in Beirut so we have also confirmed with them very, very recently. This is the Arab world. There has been more recent, even another effort in Mexico City like a civic innovation that there. It was called Mapaton. We have also talked to Mapaton recently and we might collaborate hopefully we'll collaborate with them on using tools and on furthering the development of the tools because we find that they have the exact same problems and the exact same intuitions. I want to stop here so stop here no stations. That's all the time we have. Thank you very much.