Sharjah Salik Gates. Dubai's Hundred Million Dollar Baby

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Back in 2007, when Dubai's Salik road toll was first talked about, there were rumblings and mumblings that the Al Ittihad road linking Dubai and Sharjah would be one of the locations for toll gates. The feared gate didn't materialise at the time. In fact, Dubai's Road and Transport Authority was at pains to dampen speculation regarding a 'phase two' which meant, of course, that phase two was just around the corner.

When it came, phase two added a gate to the Sheikh Zayed Road and one to Maktoum Bridge. Both of these, as the original gates, were avoidable, but only by taking a more roundabout route. In fact the RTA, which likes to trumpet its green credentials (even going so far as to award a silver-plated cow's aorta for sustainable transport), has created a system of tolls that lengthens thousands of commuters' journeys each day by taking the most direct route.

And so it is with the new gates, which set the extraordinary precedent of taxing travel between two emirates. You'll be able to make a tax-free Sharjah/Dubai journey by travelling out to the E311 (The Road Formerly Known As The Emirates Road), a significantly longer drive than the Ittihad road. This is predicated on the vast road improvement scheme currently underway on the E311, which upgrades the junctions leading up to the infamous National Paints Roundabout and is intended to remove the bottleneck at National Paints. This is scheduled, we are told, for completion in April. I'll be delighted if it is, but looking at the current state of National Paints I simply can't see it happening.

What will happen if the changes to National Paints aren't ready or, worse, turn out not to work? Will the RTA go ahead, turn on Salik on April 15 (the announced 'go live' date) and create massive, snarling jams on a road already comprehensively choked by the large volume of inter-emirate traffic it carries? The move will certainly put huge pressure on a brand new road network in a known and notorious traffic hotspot. But then it's Sharjah's problem, isn't it? Dubai won't care, it'll be too busy counting the proceeds.

Back when it was launched, Salik was meant to raise Dhs600 million a year in fees according to 'traffic expert' and chairman of the RTA, Mattar Al Tayer. It's consistently whizzed past those targets, raising a stunning Dhs669 million in 2008 and 776 million in 2009. Media reports in 2011 told of Salik being used to underpin securitised loans of Dhs 2.93 billion based on its revenues to 2015. Apart from that, we have seen few up to date figures on Salik revenues - but a four year loan of Dhs2.93 billion would be about consistent with 2009 revenues - a tad over Dhs730 million a year. There's no doubt, whatever its impact on traffic has been, it has been an amazing success financially.

Now, with the Ittihad road carrying some 260,000 vehicles a day, an amazing number but one that comes straight from the horse's mouth, the RTA can look forward to raising a cool million dirhams a day or a hundred million dollars a year. According to the RTA itself, the whole scheme is intended to divert some 1500 vehicles per day to the E311 or E611 Dubai Bypass Road. I can see a lot more than 1,500 people choosing to take the long way round to avoid paying Dhs8 per day. Most people around here would buy and sell you for a Dirham.

That's effectively a hundred million dollar tax on travel to and from Sharjah. Neat.

It also means you're paying Dhs28 straight away to any taxi to take you to Dubai before the meter starts ticking and Dhs36 if you cross any of the 'internal' Salik gates. When I first came here, you could get a cab to Chicago Beach from Sharjah for Dhs25. Ah, me, but those were the days, eh?

Salik Surprises

So much has been written about Dubai’s congestion charge, Salik, that it’s difficult to contemplate adding to what’s already out there without a certain sense of resignation and perhaps a touch of fear that it’s just going to be a repetition of the considerable volume of incredulity, indignation, anger and exasperated invective that has peppered so many blogs over the past couple of months. Even the media, ever-aware of the burden of governmental disapproval, has tried to reflect the broad public dislike of the scheme. Strangely, few of the people who have complained appear to have been motivated to do so by the financial impact: it has been the apparent lack of a clear objective or a well-communicated plan of any sort that has drawn much of the negative comment in both on and off-line media. The response of the RTA, to the broad public concern has, at its least helpful, been to tell the public to stow it because they’re ‘not traffic experts’. The flow of information regarding the scheme and the ‘traffic management objectives’ that we’re told about as we hold for the Salik call centre to finish ‘helping’ other callers has hardly ever been more than a grudging trickle.

I am one of those people whose mobile numbers were ‘given wrongly’: I still have the copy of the form in which my mobile number is given with perfect clarity. I corrected the error over the ‘phone last week when I got through to their call centre. Today I got an SMS telling me that my balance of Dhs 2 was insufficient and that I should top up or face a fine. Now, forgive me, but I thought that one of the ideas was that you’d get an SMS warning you that your balance was low. Apparently not.

So I went to top up. I have to confess I was a little annoyed at having to do this on the spur of the moment rather than with a couple of crossings’ notice, but never mind. The Emarat station just prior to the Garhoud toll only has one till that can take Salik top-ups because they only have one pad of Salik top up forms – a rather analogue, multipart book of slips.

I can pay my phone bill using online and telephone banking, as well as my electricity and water bill. I can pay my traffic fines and I can even renew my PO box online.

But I have to top up my Salik account by filling in a cloakroom slip? So be it. I aimed to top up with a nice Dhs250 so that I wouldn't have to do it again for a good while. So I gave the girl my Visa card. Which is when I discovered you can only pay for Salik by cash.

What a muckle-headed slice of totally incompetent daftness.

But I’m not finished by a long chalk. You see, I then drove over Garhoud to hit the tailback immediately after the bridge. Because it’s gridlocked over Maktoum and the new Floating Bridge through City Centre and up the Ittihad Road to Sharjah. Because the traffic that’s crossed Business Bay to avoid Salik joins Garhoud a couple of hundred meters after the very bridge that this Salik scheme was meant to keep clear. It’s caused worse traffic congestion in the whole Deira area than we have every seen before and THIS IS SUMMER TRAFFIC – the number of cars on the road is something like 25% less than normal.

I thought I’d get a few laughs out of Salik but I, along with a lot of other people, have stopped laughing. Come September, when the traffic levels ramp back up to their usual heaving stock car race levels, there’ll be a whole lot more people not laughing.

Someone should really start doing some explaining.

Salik and Thanks for all the Fish

Looking at visitors to this blog (thanks for dropping by: hope you had fun), it has to be said that many are people that have been searching Google for information related to Dubai's Salik toll gate system and have been ending up here instead. So I'd like to apologise.

Sorry.

I have frequently been frivolous and lobbed stones into the whole Salik debate but genuinely have little constructive to say. That's partly because there's so little to say that is constructive. I also have little useful to tell you other than that Dubai's Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) allegedly employs some 15 people in its public relations department and has apparently retained at least one, if not two or three PR agencies.

What they are all doing is a complete mystery to me. And no, it's not sour grapes because my agency’s not down home at the farm milking the RTA cash cow. The lack of information, engagement and transparency regarding the whole Salik congestion charge scheme has been remarkable by any standard.

Sure, the Salik system is working now. Sure, most of the major problems have been ironed out (well, apart from my registration SMS not appearing with my all-important account number without which I can't find out my balance or recharge my card, but we won't let that worry us, will we?). But it's the abiding sour taste that it's all left in people's mouths that I find interesting.

It honestly didn't have to be this way. A smarter, better planned and, above all, more transparent communications campaign could have resulted in a better informed public, more buy-in for the scheme (people tend to buy in to a well-put, sound argument that's been properly communicated) and less residual resentment. The investment, in care, time and money, was infinitesimal compared to the scale of the whole scheme.

I wonder if I’m the only person out there that thinks that the communications element of the whole Salik affair has been handled poorly? Somehow I don't think I am...

Are You Getting the Salik Message?

As predicted earlier, the SMS infrastructure that's underpinning the Salik road toll in Dubai has been providing some unscheduled summer surprises, with Gulf News reporting (one suspects a touch gleefully, if the truth be told) on the hapless punters whose mobiles have been flooded with huge quantities of SMSs originating from the Road and Transport Authority (RTA).

Now getting SMS spam is bad enough (it's still an occasional annoyance in the UAE, although nothing like the constant stream we used to get). But these people have been receiving over a hundred texts overnight! Can you imagine what it feels like to get a tsunami of SMS spam from the people behind the universally popular and well regarded road toll scheme?

I bet it had them hopping, I really do...

I still haven't got my activation message. I wonder how they're doing with that data entry? >;0)

That Toll Again

Well, as predicted, the papers were indeed filled with Salik yesterday. Every front page bar one had the story of the clear roads by the toll gates and the chaos everywhere else. Gulf News dared to be different and didn't put the Salik story on its front page at all, which was a nice change. And Emirates Today splashed with 'Salik Chaos' which was an even nicer change, although the tone of the story, perhaps rather predictably, didn't quite follow through from the headline.

Nobody's got a confirmation SMS. Nobody quite knows what's happening about that (although I refer you to my earlier mathematical sleight of hand) yet. Today's papers are still rumbling and grumbling but life is settling down back to its regular rhythm.

Wait 'till they try and sneak the next set of toll gates in, though. Look out for announcements regarding the success of the Salik pilot scheme and how that success has led to a review and subsequent decision to expand it to cover other routes...

My money's on Jebel Ali, Qusais and Business Bay. Because that's where there are 'Salik 2km' signs today, put up by someone who rather jumped the gun...

Salik - A Momentary Lapse of Reason

Well, the papers should be full of this lot tomorrow. Dubai's congestion charge cuts in and it's certainly true that there's been no congestion today at the two points in the city where the toll's RFID scanners span the road.

But oh, dearie me, the picture is far from pretty almost everywhere else. Pushing thousands of cars an hour off the arterial Sheikh Zayed Road meant that the city's streets were heaving: the traffic this evening backed up past the airport, Maktoum and Satwa were rammed with punters trying to find any which way but Salik.

Even the Emarat station before the Garhoud toll had its queues: application form-waving punters ten deep as they made that last minute application for the little orange sticker. Barsha and the area around the projects was apparently misery this morning and will have been again tonight.

Some of the day's best fun was to be had on Facebook, the new forum for the Middle East's chatterers: "It’s a car park! I can’t find the logic in this!!!" says a furious Suzy, while an astonished Alisha keys, "It was also the worst road rage I've ever seen in my life!"

"With the exception of one straight stretch of road starting at Al Barsha, going through Sheikh Zayed Road, towards Garhoud Bridge, the remaining streets of Dubai have successfully, overnight, been turned into one huge parking lot," says a shocked Sherif who goes on, one suspects with a touch of irony, to say: "So worry not residents, all you need to do to grab lunch is turn off your engines wherever you are, pop out for a bite, and odds are, traffic will be at a standstill upon your return!"

While my favourite contribution of the day, from a naughty Nadim, was: "Anyone fancy helping me to take out a half page ad in the newspapers thanking RTA?"

I predicted this would be fun. And yes, I am delighted to have told you so. And I don't think it's really started in earnest yet: the best is definitely yet to come.

What larks, Pip!!

Salik: Wading Through a Mountain of Forms

I was thinking about refusing to babble on about Salik, the Dubai congestion charge, any more simply because everyone's talking about it so much it's in danger of getting boring.

But then I have been giggling quietly to myself so much this morning, I had to share. As predicted in posts passim, Salik is turning out to be far too much fun to ignore.

When you apply for your tag (as I did on Sunday), you fill out a form with your name, address, mobile number and car registration. If the databases were smart, you'd be able simply to give your vehicle registration number and everything else would be pulled from the database. Which rather points to the fact that the registration database isn't linked to Salik. Which rather points to manual data entry of those forms. Which rather points to delays in getting accounts activated.

So I called the nice Salik people on 800 SALIK (800 72545) and asked why I hadn't yet received my SMS advising me that my account was activated, as advertised. And they said there was a data entry backlog and I should kick my heels for a further 2-3 days.

Today's Gulf News (Emirates Today, for some reason is suddenly silent about Salik) reports a four day delay from readers, with one unhappy chappie saying he applied over a week ago and still hasn't got his SMS.

Oh dear, oh dear. There are only three more shopping days to Salik day and I have only yet seen two cars on the roads wearing their Salik tags. Media reports are a little confusing, but it would appear that 200,000 tags have been distributed in total, with reports of sales of 80,000.

Now. Let us assume that each form can be data entered in an average of two minutes (including downtime, error checking & toilet breaks, I think that's more than reasonable). That would mean 333 forms could be processed by one operator in a working day. So 80,000 forms would entail 240 man-days of data entry. If you had a massive data entry operation with 50 people working on entry, you're looking at 6.6 days' work.

However, we've got 200,000 tags out there and, this being Dubai, most people haven't bought their tags yet. Let us assume, then, that the 80,000 already sold have been data entered (although mine hasn't!). From today, we have another 120,000 tag applications to enter. That's going to take our 50 data entry operators ten days. So they'll be entered around about the 12th July given that no more applications are received.

I am, of course, more than happy to be told my calculations are incorrect and do point out that this is all speculation, guess-work and conjecture. But that's what people do when they're not being told what's happening...

So someone, somewhere is likely sitting underneath a huge and growing pile of forms while retailers will be facing the prospect of a weekend of increasingly angry customers demanding their tags and the call centre's in danger of getting flooded and people whose accounts aren't activated are probably going to start triggering fines or just be too scared to go through the gates...

It's all kicking off rather nicely, isn't it? What larks, Pip!

Are Dubai's Businesses Ignoring the Salik Toll?

Most businesses I have spoken to about it haven’t got around to thinking about their policy regarding the Salik congestion charge yet. Which is possibly slightly strange.

Does your company intend to pay the Salik costs of business travel? Will you get an allowance? Or is the company simply ignoring the additional charges and expecting you to pay them out of your pocket?

If companies intend to pay it, it’s possible to envisage the charge contributing an additional cost to service businesses of anything up to 1%. In other words, Salik is a significant potential addition to the cost at the bottom line – and an inflationary contributor.

The costs soon mount up, by the way. And if, as I suspect, we will be seeing a lot more Salik Tollgates springing up, we’ll be looking at the potential for Dubai's busy business types to relatively easily rack up the full daily Dhs 24 per day charge (6 passes) with ease. At Dhs 24 for 5 working days and 11 months (say you spend your four week leave out of the country), that’s a cool annual Dhs 5,280 ($1,444).

So what is the policy? Pay reasonable business travel, pay an allowance to offset the effect on staff pockets or let them pay it themselves? Companies will undoubtedly find staff asking about it over the coming week.

Look on the bright side. One point of view is that it should at least cut down on the useless and frustratingly unnecessary meetings we all suffer from. :)

Salik Goes Ahead. Of Course.

The near-hysterical tone of the chatter surrounding Dubai's controversial Salik (Arabic for 'clear') congestion charge has been cranked up by a report from Zawya Dow Jones that the introduction of the toll may be delayed. The original Zawya story, that the RTA was meeting Sunday to discuss possibly delaying the scheme in the face of public reaction, was denied by the RTA and the denial story is front page 7Days, Gulf News and Gulf Today. Khaleej Times and the Arabics didn't go as big with it.

Zawya's sticking with the story it had, updated here, but is saying that the meeting was duly held and RTA decided to go ahead with the scheme. None of the stories add much information, of course.

We are terribly prone to this type of hysteria here in Lalaland. A few years ago a Shopping Festival stunt to bake the world's biggest cake (it stretched up Maktoum Street and down Muraqqabat or something like that, if my ageing memory serves me right) came to a messy end after a rumour went around that there were keys to a Toyota Lexus hidden in the cake: 'members of the public' lost no time in attacking the enormous sugary confection in search of a bonanza that was, sadly, not there.

Now we're getting hysterical at any opportunity to believe that we won't have to pay Dhs 100 for the damn tag and another Dhs4 every time we pass a toll gate. The level of speculation and gossip that's out there, of course, being the direct result of a flawed and unclear communications strategy. The great lesson here: news expands to fill a vacuum.

But what larks, Pip!