The headline for the Abu Dhabi story is, “Feet First into the Future”, which I quite like. A very friendly image.
The article admits that at the moment AD is not very attractive for pedestrians, but amazingly the city is actually trying to fix things (unlike some other emirates I know). The Urban Planning Council actually has this to say: “We want to improve …by creating better and more cohesive, more connected districts for people to live and work in.” They also mention trying to provide a way for people to get around sans auto which is quite refreshing. Future plans include, “shading on pavements using plants, arcades and tents. Streets will be made narrower in some areas to give more space to pavements and in some cases one lane will be designated for public transit.” Wowza!
But wait you say; Dubai has already started building a metro, and bought 1600 buses! While this is quite true, and very laudable, Dubai doesn’t seem to see the Metro and bus system as part of a holistic change in how the city operates. Sure, there will soon be a metro, but there will also soon be billions of Dirhams of new highways as we find out in our contrasting article from the National, “Dh1.4bn roads revamp for Dubai”
If Dubai was really serious about changing peoples habits and getting them out of their cars they would be taking a cue from Abu Dhabi and reducing the number of lanes of traffic when the metro opens rather than building gobs more highway capacity. Shouldn’t you make it MORE difficult to drive in order to convince people to take the metro? Where is the stick? Its all carrot here.
The incredibly disturbing thing to me is, they are about to dig up and interchange-ize the trade center round about. The one and ONLY remaining signalized intersection on the entire length of the great wall of Sheik Zayed Rd. I’ll wager that there is absolutely no pedestrian or bicycle facility planned for the new interchange, despite there being a huge number of pedestrians currently passing through the area and changing between buses there (I seem to be the only cyclist passing through, it isn’t exactly what I would call bicycle friendly at the moment, but at least its not a freaking huge interchange).
The article also mentions the new bypass between Garhoud bridge and the 312 road behind the trade center. I had been wondering what was going on at the intersection of Zabeel 2nd Rd and 312 Rd; there are quite a few new bridge piers running over through Zabeel park. I can’t quite figure out where the thing is going to land, but rest assured it will bring speeding berserk drivers who still think they are on a highway straight onto (the relatively safe) 312 Rd. Thanks a lot RTA!
I am pretty sure the RTA is following me around and making sure to completely mess up any of the halfway decent roads I have found to ride on. All in the name of relieving congestion! Here is some free advice to the RTA, there is absolutely no way to build your way out of congestion (other than building mass transit), study after study has shown increasing road capacity only leads to more traffic and more increases in road capacity. Dubai had the luxury of being able to learn from the rest of the developed world’s mistakes, but they seem to have cocked it up royally and walked into all the same traps that the US did. Now they are stuck with endless miles of suburbs and massive traffic clogged highways.
Perhaps I should look into moving to Abu Dhabi.
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