[Ch.G, Ch.G]

The article says the new capital will sit on the "edge" of Cairo. In other words, it won't really be a new city at all but an extension of the Cairo urban area.

I know it seems like a good strategy for alleviating congestion and pollution, but doesn't relocating a capital—at least in this day and age—counterintuitively increase those problems? If the new capital is built to both 1) better accommodate the automobile and 2) reduce population density (out of the misbegotten belief that crowded cities are worse for one's health, the environment, etc.), they might be able to achieve more "personal space" for the individual but at the expense of transit congestion (at least when the city reaches maximum capacity) and pollution created by goods and services traveling longer distances to reach the same number of people that they did in Cairo—not to mention the other inefficiencies created by decentralization.

Wouldn't Egypt be better off taking the money that they would spend on building a new city from scratch and using it to improve Cairo's existing infrastructure?