13 February, 2008

Gear up for more traffic

The Garhoud Bridge closure and the Al Nahda roundabout closure has led to increased traffic. According to an Arabian Business report, it's still not over.

Dubai motorists are in for further traffic chaos from Wednesday night with the closure of parts of Sheikh Zayed Road to allow for the construction of a pedestrian bridge.

The Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) said on Tuesday the closure would affect the fast lane in both directions of the road between Defence Interchange and the Trade Centre roundabout.

The lanes will be closed from Thursday at 1am to Sunday at 5am, the RTA said.

Maitha bin Adai, CEO of RTA Traffic and Roads, said the new pedestrian crossing was required to cut the number of pedestrian fatalities on Sheikh Zayed Road.

10 comments:

Philip said...

this is good... the rta should close lanes every other weekend and build more pedestrian bridges... and some pavements whilst they're at it too.

Dubai Jazz said...

The lanes will be closed from Thursday at 1am to Sunday at 5am

That's only during the weekend, not so bad...

btw, I don't like this post, it's not Al Qouz-related. ;)

rosh said...

seems they are working on quite a few projects all at or around the same time....

Kyle said...

Will this pedestrian crossing bridge be temperature controlled? What with Sheikh Zayed Road being the main artery (with the look) that connects inbound/outbound traffic?

For that matter, Dubai needs a lot of subways and pedestrian crossing bridges to cater to jaywalkers.

Dubai Jazz:

What about this label not being Al Qouz-related? I didn’t quite catch your drift!

Dubai Entrepreneur said...

Finally. I never understood why this hasn't been done for so long. Completely agree with Kyle.. RTA should have a new outdoors campaign:

"We did it! Less roadkill on SZR!"

Dubai Jazz said...

Kyle,
It's changed actually, now I think it should have been Al Jumairah-related (since I got home from work).
Well… to put it mildly, I sometimes get this feeling of insularity. I work in Al Quoz area and I was at work when I read the post and since it didn't pertain to my locality at the time, I felt very disturbed and out of place with the world…..if you know what I mean….;)

i*maginate said...

I was driving towards Dxb downtown one day and saw a guy walking in the opposite direction on the inner hard shoulder around the 2nd interchange...when I passed him, I was trying to figure out where on earth he could have entered the middle of the motorway from...heaven knows!

There are plenty of people who prob can't even afford a bus - there need to be proper pavements all around Dubai. I was trying to walk from one building to the next along a certain stretch of SZR but half of the pavement was non existent, so I had to walk on the road. Not very modern, that, is it.

nzm said...

I don't know why they don't put pedestrian tunnels under the roads instead of putting bridges over them. It would mean that cyclists could use them too.

Guess that it's too hard.

Grumpy Goat said...

To nzm:
The biggest problem with underpasses is that you have to dig an enormous hole under part of the live carriageway and leave it open while you do all the concrete work. Meanwhile, run all the traffic on the other half of the road. Then backfill over the half you've built and repeat. Oh, and all the existing electricity and telecoms cables, water mains and sewer pipes have to be diverted.

Result: misery and chaos for months.

At least with the bridge option the groundworks are limited to the foundations. Once these are in, completing the deck takes a couple of hours. Build it off site somewhere and hoist it into position off a flat bed truck early one Friday morning.

Another advantage of the bridge is that it doesn't fill with water wherever there's rain, and a third is that it's invariably cheaper.

nzm said...

GG: yeah, that's why I commented that it must be too hard. Thanks for the explanation from one who knows!

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