Dubai becomes a little more walkable

Dubai is known as a very car-oriented place.¹ Exhibit number one is Sheikh Zayed Road, a 16-to-24-lane limited-access highway that extends through nearly the whole length of Dubai’s post-1990s neighborhoods including those containing most of the city’s famous skyscrapers.

Sheikh Zayed Road from the pedestrian bridge built to allow Metro passengers to cross it. Dubai Metro is on the right, Dubai Tram is on the left. For the first twenty years of the widened road’s existence, it was practically impossible to cross it on foot.

Pedestrian needs were the last thing on its creators’ minds when it was built, and for several decades Sheikh Zayed Road was all but uncrossable on foot. A New Yorker article from 2005 suggested that Sheikh Zayed Road was “as if Fifth Avenue had been allowed to evolve into the Long Island Expressway.”² Sheikh Zayed Road is not the only problem faced by pedestrians in Dubai. The fact is that, if you try to walk just about anywhere in one of the newer parts of the city, you will frequently come to places where the sidewalk ends or where cross-traffic makes it impossible to move forward.

Pedestrian-unfriendly commercial urban street. Southwest of Burjuman station, Dubai Metro in the background. Photograph taken February 2010.

In fact, as I was reminded in the course of a recent trip to Dubai (my fourth), this stereotype exaggerates. The older parts of Dubai—especially Deira on the right (northeast) bank of Dubai Creek but also Bur Dubai across the Creek—predate Dubai’s massive automobilization. Deira isn’t particularly old–there were just a few dozen buildings there in the 19th century—but, even without old buildings, it does a pretty good job of functioning like a traditional Muslim city.

Commercial street in Deira.

Its streets are narrow and irregular. There are small street-level shops lining many streets. Some streets have been pedestrianized, and a few pedestrianized blocks have even acquired rooves.

The gold market in Deira. Covered section is in the background.

The latter mostly serve a tourist market that seems to be doing pretty well. Across the Creek in Bur Dubai, there are even some tiny neighborhoods—Shindagha and al Fahidi—where traditional urban buildings have been restored or (I think more often) reconstructed, and these neighborhoods are even more pedestrian-friendly. There is a path along the Creek on which motor traffic is forbidden, and it gets quite a lot of use.

The walkway along Dubai Creek in Shindagha, Burj Khalifa (8 km away) in background.

Even the outer parts of Deira, like the area around the Riqqa Metro station, where the streets are wide and straight, have busy sidewalks, full of restaurants and hotels and apartment and office buildings built flush with the street. It’s hard to imagine a more pedestrian-friendly area.

Along Al Rigga Road, outside Deira proper.

The fact that, faced with draconian fines, drivers do respect pedestrians—they stop at red lights and even at crosswalks—helps enormously. Deira and Bur Dubai are much more pleasant—and safer—for pedestrians than just about any other places in the Arab world.

Even in the much larger parts of Dubai that have mostly been developed over the last thirty or so years and that really were built mostly to accommodate the automobile there have been some developments over the last decade that have in some gentle ways changed things a little.

The most obvious change is that a Metro was built, complementing an already existing pretty good public bus system. The first Metro line opened in 2009, the second in 2011.

Map of Dubai and vicinity focusing on rail lines and pedestrian facilities. GIS data from Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap, modified considerably, chiefly by the addition of some recently built walkways. The database includes pedestrian facilities like bridges across streets and extremely short alleyways that may be somewhat confusing in a map at this scale, especially in the older parts of the city, but the broad patterns should be clear.

The Metro was constructed in every way to modern standards. For a time Dubai’s Metro was the world’s longest driverless system. The stations (even those on the elevated portions of the line) are all air-conditioned.

The Al Ghubaiba subway station, Dubai Metro.

Trains come along every couple of minutes during peak times. The system is generally considered a great success. There are approximately 350,000 riders a day (in an urban area of maybe three million). There are definitely some issues for people who want to walk to the stations that are situated in the outer part of the city. But these have been at least mitigated. When the Metro was being constructed, it built enclosed, air-conditioned bridges over the roads it follows, even Sheikh Zayed Road. You don’t have to buy a Metro ticket to use these bridges. There are also additional pedestrian bridges, typically not built as part of Metro construction, that take you to destinations close to but not right at stations. The most spectacular of these is a 1-km enclosed bridge between the Metro’s Burj Khalifa station and Dubai Mall (said to be the world’s largest). Anyone who doubted the willingness of Dubai’s residents to walk anywhere would be amazed by the sheer number of people who use this bridge. Cynics would say that it’s no coincidence that Dubai’s busiest walkway is air-conditioned, includes moving sidewalks, and takes you to a mall.

The covered (and air-conditioned) bridge between the Burj Khalifa Metro station and Dubai Mall. Photograph taken October 2015.

A “tram” system was added in 2014. This light-rail line complements the Metro, intersecting with it in two places and serving several new developments in the Jumeirah area. There is also a monorail to Palm Jumeirah. Neither the tram nor the monorail has attracted a huge number of riders. The price of the (private) monorail may be a factor. The fare is 15 AED (USD 4.08). (The fares on the Metro and tram are reasonable.)

Even more significant (and contrary to every stereotype about Dubai), the government has embarked on a program of building walking and bicycling paths and urging their use. These are all separate from the road network. As in many other automobile-oriented cities, it has seemed easiest to build new pedestrian facilities that have nothing to do with the existing road network rather than to try to improve sidewalks and street crossings and perhaps to impede traffic. The catch is that, as in most places, the new pedestrian facilities don’t fit together very well or necessarily permit walking to places where one would want to go.

The first large-scale construction of pedestrian facilities may have occurred in semi-private developments in a part of Dubai known as the Dubai Marina.³ The most impressive single development here is Jumeirah Beach Residence, said to be the largest new residential complex in the world (2010). This area was marketed particularly to Europeans, and the advertisements endlessly extol its “7 km of landscaped public walkways.”

Ad for the Marina’s walkways. This ad is plastered over nearly every construction fence in the development. It’s clear that the project’s builders believe this to be a selling point. Photograph taken October 2015.

Most of these paths follow a waterway that connects with the Gulf at both ends.

Walkway in the Marina.

There is also a street called the Walk (2008), which has a wide sidewalk and only a narrow automobile lane.

The Walk, Marina, Dubai.

The street is lined with restaurants (mostly North American fast-food restaurants putting on a very elegant face) and seems to attract quite a lot of business even during Dubai’s hot season. In other words, the developers have done what they could to create a congenial walking environment here.

Several other new developments in southwestern Dubai have followed suit and have incorporated walking facilities into their planning. Note all the green on the lower left of the map.

Pedestrian paths have also been built (this time mostly by the Roads and Transport Authority) along beaches. There’s a 6.8 km “Jumeirah Jogging Trail” between roughly the Burj al Arab and the new Dubai Water Canal dating from 2014.

Jumeirah Jogging Track. Its relative emptiness is typical.

It continues in two separate shorter segments south of the Dubai Water Canal. It attracts both runners and walkers—and a few (not quite legal) cyclists.

The massive Dubai Water Canal project has led to the construction of possibly the most ambitious pedestrian development of all. The Dubai Water Canal is in effect an extension of Dubai Creek southwest from its former terminus in the Nature Reserve. It passes southwest of “Downtown Dubai” and then turns back toward the Gulf, passing by the new Business Bay, a mammoth development of skyscraper office and apartment buildings. There are walkways on both sides of the Water Canal and some pedestrian bridges too (latest segment opened, 2018). The walkways are impressive, but I couldn’t help but notice that there seemed to be very few people using them when I was there.

Dubai Water Canal walkway with lone runner and cyclist. Note “Downtown Dubai” and Business Bay in the background and the construction site to the left. Despite Dubai’s reputation for being a high-rise city, most middle-class people probably live in two-story single-family houses more or less like those shown in the middle distance.

Runners, walkers, and cyclists were greatly outnumbered by the mostly South Asian laborers employed to maintain the paths. The paths did get a little more crowded after sundown. There are even a few lone women joggers after dark, a real sign that this is a safe area.

There are a few more users along the Dubai Water Canal late in the afternoon and even after dark.

It also needs to be said that many sites along the Dubai Water Canal are still undeveloped. It’s often mentioned that this billion-dollar project has inspired ten billion dollars in development work, and, when this work is further along, more people may use the Canal walkway. But it’s clear that the development of the Dubai Water Canal walkway has not turned very many residents of the housing developments on its banks into avid urban pedestrians. This appears especially true of Asian residents of these developments. I couldn’t help but notice that most users of the walkway are ethnic Westerners, largely expatriates.

The walkway along the Dubai Water Canal is supposed to be extended to the old Dubai Creek someday, but, for the moment, it stops where there’s a tangle of limited-access highways at the edge of “Downtown Dubai.”⁴

End of Dubai Water Canal walkway.

There are also quite a number of new cycling paths at the edge of the city, which I haven’t visited. There are supposed to be 500 km of “cycling tracks” by 2021 and 850 km by 2030.⁵ Note that Dubai has a pretty good record of actually building what it sets out to build.

It’s quite striking how much Dubai has had a change of heart when it comes to its urban development policies. Dubai’s urban decision-making is not at all transparent, but what is clear is that its government is acutely aware of foreign comments and completely au courant with current trends in planning. I’m sure that there is wide awareness of the fact that Western planning agencies no longer think that accommodating the automobile should be the most important goal of urban planners. There is also the issue that Dubai’s government loves to astonish the world, and it has chosen to do so in part with its decisions about urban architecture and planning. The emphasis on turning an automobile-oriented place into one more congenial for pedestrians and cyclists is surely one manifestation of this tendency. The fact that Dubai is competing with Abu Dhabi, Doha, Manama, and other places—many of which have their own schemes for tilting modal splits away from the automobile—has certainly also been a factor in the shift in emphasis.