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. Who’s Buying the Taxi’s Tags, Then?

Mr. Ghulam the taxi driver is not at all happy about the Salik congestion charge (although, if we’re to believe Gulf News, neither’s anyone else except ‘traffic expert’ Mattar Al Tayer). Apart from anything else, he wants to know who’s going to pay the Dhs100 upfront cost of the Salik RFID tag itself. As a taxi driver, he’s pretty sure his Sharjah company isn’t going to spring for it. Although the TRA has been clear that passengers should pay the Dhs4 ($1) for the toll itself if they insist on passing a toll gate, nobody’s said who should pay for the tag itself. And Dhs100 is a lot of money to a taxi driver here in the city of dreams.

Meanwhile, signs for Salik gates are springing up on access roads to Dubai – spotted so far in Qusais and the Sheikh Zayed Road by Jebel Ali. Does that mean more Salik gates are on the way? Fans of early announcements remember promises of gates on every access road to Dubai and a figure of 70 gates was being bandied about at one stage.

Watch those spaces!!!

Salik Triggers Toll Gate Tetris

I'm sorry. I couldn't help it. Apologies to Gulf News, whose photo triggered this unworthy Friday thought. :)