On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt by Barak On

Author:Barak, On [Barak, On]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520276130
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2013-07-19T00:00:00+00:00

THE BIRTH OF DROMOPOLITICS

If ticket reselling was the conductor’s preferred way of surviving and subverting the oppressive time-is-money logic underpinning the tram system, how did a typical tram driver respond to the bundling together of his salary, speed, and schedule under the watchful eye of foreign supervisors who secured this linkage? As we have seen, the tramway unevenly compressed urban space and time. The speed that facilitated this compression became a central object of criticism in the Egyptian press.115 The abstract categories of risk available to us cast the speed of modern means of transportation as class-, gender- and colorblind. But it was clear to readers of Egyptian newspapers that the unfortunate effects of the tram’s speed were unevenly distributed.

The dangerous speed of the tram was often linked in the press to tram drivers’ obligation to keep to schedule and heavy workload.116 This was indeed an accurate observation: by 1900 there were no clear speed limits for trams. Tram drivers were instructed by law to adjust their speed according to their schedules.117 The schedule was simultaneously the driver’s objective and the means of supervising him; it was keeping its keepers. Yet it was always clear that the schedule, an ostensibly abstract standard or yardstick that seemed to precede the circumstances of its production, was imposed from outside, indexing a colonial power hierarchy. Even the schedule’s language let this fact slip: a 1905 Al-Kawkab article cited complaints by “many local Egyptians” about the fact that the departure and arrival times of Alexandria streetcars were written only in French or English and followed the “Frankish” timekeeping system. “What should an Egyptian who does not know these languages do? Should he go to the translators’ school?”118

The danger of unrestricted speed manifested itself mainly in two ways. First, speed resulted in road collisions with other vehicles and pedestrians. Streetcars driving at full speed through Cairo and Alexandria’s crowded streets without being able to change course violently introduced new braking distances, modes of attentiveness, and hazard zones. Cabbies and cart drivers halting twenty meters or more in front of a moving tram often discovered, sometimes with fatal consequences, that this did not allow the tram sufficient time to stop.119 Tram drivers in turn resorted to unconventional methods for clearing a crowded street, including—beyond frequent use of their horn—shouting, spitting, and in some (probably extreme) cases, throwing stones.120 Because the horn and bell pedals were operated by foot,121 tram drivers were left with free hands for steering and stoning pedestrians. In one instance in 1905, a driver threw a heavy block with such force that he himself fell out of the vehicle, which then collided head-on with another tram.122

Second, to keep to schedule, tram drivers regularly refused to stop at stations to allow passengers to get on and off, pretending not to notice people waiting in stations or to hear requests to alight coming from within the tram. They kept moving unless the request came from a foreigner or a woman, in which case drivers were more inclined to stop.

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