Roger The Radar Rotter

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Roger the Radar Rotter generally lurks around the Sharjah University City area. His favourite places are the roads around the AUS campus, the back road that tracks along the landfill from the logistics center to the roundabout by Sharjah English School and the Middle Road from the Mileiha Road up to the 311. Oh! And also on the stretch of Middle Road just beyond the 311 turnoff towards Sharjah City.

He's more Wile E. Coyote than most. He likes to hide his little portable radar behind a lamp post and then drive a few hundred yards up the road and lurk, no doubt giggling softly to himself and drooling, waiting for the flashes to go off.

Knowing full well that we skittish victims can sniff he's around when he parks up, he often hides the car. This means the wary are rewarded with glimpses of cars parked in odd places as more trusting souls trigger the cheery 'pop' of the radar followed by the inevitable 'cherching' of the Sharjah Police cash register.

It's an expensive game these days: they've just put the fines up. So why speed at all? You ask, in all sensibility.

Well, the reason Roger has quite so much fun with his sneaky tricks is he likes to pick roads that have insane 60kph limits on them. The roads around the University are, for instance, long and straight and have two lanes. They are nowhere near any crossings or habitation, just long tarmac stretches running along outside the high campus walls. The UAE, very sensibly IMHO, has a 'grace limit' of 20kph above the actual speed limit, so you can travel a maximum 80kph on these roads. Nudge it just 1 kilo above it when Roger's around and POW you're toast, bub.

The wee back road behind Sharjah English is a long straight line of blacktop running along a fence and surrounded by scrubland. The low speed limits make the drive interminably frustrating and the old speedometer does rather tend to sneak up a little. And then you spot, out of the corner of your eye, a glint of something out of place. Slow down, pass by regally and breathe a little sigh of relief as Roger sits in his hidden car, shaking his fists and snarling, 'Damn you McNabb!'

The other day I was driving thusly, overtaking a very slow lorry on the road behind SES. I had spotted Roger's car on the hard shoulder ahead and was taking things easy, when I get some spotty Herbert in an FJ giving it socks on the flashers and horn behind me. With a resigned sigh I pulled in beyond the front of the lorry and moderated my speed.

With satanic glee, I watched my tormentor speed past me, honouring me with a great display of shade thrown sideways as he hit the throttle to let me know one of us was a real man with a real right foot and the other a sissy rated by all and sundry as less than zero.

Boom!

Tisshhhh...

I felt a little like Elric of Melniboné, Michael Moorcock's anti-hero whose sword feasts on souls and passes a little of the energy to its tragic albino* wielder.

For I had given Roger the soul he craved but the benefit, my precioussss, was mine, all mine...

*Apparently these days we're supposed to say 'person of albinism' but frankly, my dear...

The Road Oop North - National Paints Opens Up

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Sorry, second post about traffic in a week, but we took the Mohammed Bin Zayed Road north from Dubai to Ajman yesterday - the day the northern section of the National Paints Widening project opened - and what a glorious ride it was. Not a queue in sight. Five lanes of blissful blacktop all the way over the top and down the other side. Even the Grand Old Duke Of York would have fitting his men on this one.

Perhaps a little hesitancy as traffic encountered the new section, likely a lot to do with the lack of road markings (they clearly couldn't wait to get this sucker opened up), but nothing like the miles of choking misery that usually mark the northern approach to the infamous painty bridge.

Apparently the southern section will open within two weeks. It's going to be fascinating to see what this does to Sharjah's traffic - as I pointed out the other day, it will likely transform a whole range of Sharjah's flows and dependencies, including the daily torrent of those fleeing to the 611 and therefore congestion on the Airport, Middle and Mileiha roads.

Finally you CAN get to Ras Al Khaimah from Dubai in 45 minutes. But poor National Paints. Infamous no more, they'll have to start advertising now...

Traffic (Or The Increasing Mess On The Mileiha Road)

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Only a charlatan would post about the weather or traffic.

It goes something like this. The construction of Sharjah's new 'middle road' linking the city centre to the Mileiha road has allowed the morning traffic to flow out to the 611 (neologistically The Emirates Road) and the evening traffic to flow back. There's just one teensy weensy problemette here, in that whatever genius conceived said road decided the conjoining of the two should be a traffic light rather than a 'clover leaf' exchange. The result has been that as an increasing number of commuters have discovered the shortcut, the traffic has backed up at the light more each morning.

The Anjads used to rock up and turn the lights off, which worked handsomely, but now they've stopped. And so the traffic has found other ways out to the 611, further up the airport/Dhaid road and turning at the University or the road down through the residential areas to the Sharjah Inland Container Terminal.

The result has been to spread the increasing chaos. The pressure of the roadworks on the Emirates road has meant more drivers are willing to go to greater lengths to try and get out to the 611. In short, it's not pretty.

It's like watching sand pouring through marbles. This route blocks up, that route gets busy. That one blocks up, the other one gets busy. There's simply too much traffic trying to find its way through too small a ratrun - and it's growing noticeably busier out there.

You can do traffic studies until you go blue in the face, but the situation you're studying is constantly fluid and subject to massive change in the next few months. When the National Paints remediation is finished we'll finally see if it is enough - or too little, too late. It'll take a few weeks for things to settle down and a complete picture emerge as word gets around and the traffic patterns shift as a consequence.

I can only hope it does, because we travel on the Mileiha Road to Sarah's school every day and it's starting to look ugly every which way. And I'm talking 06.15am here, not 'rush hour'...

The Childish Game Of Number Plates

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Sarah and I for some time now have been playing a most diverting and totally childish game - number plate spotting. It's remarkable how seriously a 'good number' is taken here in the Emirates - landline, PO Box, mobile, number plate. All of these should reflect a chap's status and so, ideally, be in single figures or failing that all the same digit or otherwise auspicious. A palindrome is always good...

Car license plates in the UAE consist of a single letter and then a number. A pilot with A 777 is therefore top banana, while H 71534 is a complete duffer altogether. Clearly, a number like 25 denotes super-star status and we have actually seen one such number plate pull a massive wheelspin in front of police officers who initially started towards their bikes then saw the plate and just shrugged it off.

You'll often see the swankier breed of car on the UAE's roads sporting 30503 or 12121 and we have taken to giggling at those who have just missed the mark, for instance a Lambo with a 24749 plate has us laughing and doing 'You had one job...' impersonations.

Yeah, it probably is time we went home...

Anyway, The National today reports on the latest number plate auction in Dubai, where a bunch of two-digit plates are expected to fetch Dhs250,000 (about $68,500). That's not the whole story, though - the RTA has published a list of the plates it's got up for grabs this time around (it's by no means their first auction, the boys at the RTA have been making pin money this way for years) and we can see that Dhs 3,000 ($822) gets you a relatively unexciting H33311 while upping the ante a bit to Dhs 40,000 ($10,950) will net you 0 50005 which is a pretty neat plate, all things considered. Start getting serioo with the amount you're prepared to shell out, and you start seeing real results: Dhs 120,000 (almost $33,000) could see you sporting three figure plates, in this case M 202 or N 707.

Although I must confess, neither of those really 'do it' for me.

If you're keen on holding the clean end of the stick, you can go for I 98, L 51 or N 34. Those are the biggies. The full list of plates, just in case you're interested, is linked here. Personally, I think the Dhs40k for 0 50005 is the best deal. Anyway, happy bidding!

Dubai Traffic On The Increase. Whoopee.

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The car dealers are rubbing their hands, gleefully cackling and singing 'happy days are here again' in their broken, wheezing voices. As miserable a bunch of avaricious hunchbacks as you'll find, the saggy-skinned troglodytes in suits are hearing the sound of tills ringing and they have pronounced the sound To Be Good.

It is within the pages of the mighty Gulf News today we are told that Dubai has increased new vehicle registrations by 10% year on year. That's presumably a sign that we're seeing a 10% increase in vehicles on the road - a total of 1,240,931 vehicles were registered with the RTA this year. Car dealers in Dubai and Sharjah have apparently told the newspaper of increases in new car sales of up to 40% and anticipate a continued strong growth trend.

Even Gulf News made the connection. That means more cars on the road which means more traffic which means more congestion which means more jostling with aggressive dolts in lines of glittering metal blowing out billowing clouds of choking fumes and general bloody misery.

One place there are less cars to be found than last year, incidentally, is the Sharjah/Dubai highway. Although it still gets gummy here and there, the traffic volumes are undoubtedly down as traffic concentrates instead on choking Al Wahda street because everyone's trying to leave at Al Khan and hoy off over to the 311 (The road formerly known as the Emirates Road but now renamed the Mohammed Bin Zayed Road) to avoid shelling out Dhs4. I am constantly amazed at what lengths people will go to in order to save Dhs4 - including spending Dhs5 in extra petrol.

So Salik (the name of Dubai's traffic toll system and Arabic for 'clear') has lived up to its name. Who knew?

The question is whether the expansion of the UAE's road infrastructure will keep pace with the expansion in traffic. There's a new arterial motorway planned to link the 311 down to Abu Dhabi, while a new road system around the Trade Centre Roundabout - started before the bust and now completed by Italian company Salini, which has somehow managed to ride out the recession and its significant exposure to Dubai - is opening this week. The conversion of the National Paints Car Park into a functional road appears to be nearing completion, too - it'll be interesting to see if any number of new lanes can bring clarity to what was the UAE's most notorious traffic bottleneck.

Meanwhile, property prices in Dubai rose by more than anywhere else in the world, according to a piece in The National, which identifies a 28.5% rise in the first nine months of the year.

Oh, joy. Groundhog day.

Sharjah Cops Nail The Friday Free For All

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A one-month traffic safety awareness campaign has ended in Sharjah with a major drive to stop people dumping their cars in the streets outside mosques for Friday prayers in what is, to many, a quite incredible move.

It's long been traditional for Friday's midday prayer time to be the cue for people to park where they fancied in the street, abandoned cars outside popular mosques often reducing traffic to a single lane or even blocking roads entirely. It's amazing how people would park three or even four cars abreast on the approaches to - and even around - roundabouts. Given Sharjah has a large number of mosques, many located on roundabouts, serving residential neighbourhoods, Friday traffic can get quite random. That the problem has not been more severe has been in part down to the fact that shops and other businesses close between 11.30 and 1.30, so you've got fewer people in the streets in general.

The practice is justified by the fact the person is praying and therefore beyond reproach and has been tolerated for as long as I've been wandering around the Gulf. In Saudi Arabia, you'll often find people pulling up at the side of the road to pray, gaily abandoning their cars while they do so. But Sharjah's Friday street parking, which can reach a quite breathtaking scale, has clearly gone too far for authorities and we were amazed to see police patrols outside mosques, with cops taking numberplates and the usual jams on roundabouts notably absent.

Gulf News reports that over 200 traffic tickets were issued on Friday (a Dhs500 fine and four black points, if you don't mind) and that police distributed traffic awareness leaflets.

The acid test, of course, will be how this is implemented over time. And while it means emergency services and traffic in general won't be impeded by the 'random street parking', I can't help but feel a little sad at the passing of one of the many little quirks that makes living here so, well, interesting...

Sharjah Traffic Survey Masterplan Scheme Thingy Shock Horror

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We're about halfway through Sharjah's traffic survey, a project started in September and slated for completion in November. Traffic counters have been spotted on roundabouts, while we are told that thousands of residents will be surveyed with a number of different methodologies, including being asked questions while we sit in traffic.

Irony alert.

The survey aims to find out what we really want from transport. The answer has already been identified for us as more public transport, but we've got to be asked first.

Now comes the news that controversial consultancy AECOM has bagged a $4 million contract to draw up a 'master plan' for Sharjah's transportation network, to be ready by 2015. Amongst other things, AECOM will work on 'developing a scheme appraisal framework', whatever that is. Apparently the study will also lead to 'fostering modal shift towards public transport and collective modes.'

Which means more public transport, no? It's always nice to see a study of a problem that sets out already having identified the solution. It's so much more comforting that way.

Mind you, it's funny they're going to all this effort when a few hours looking at Nokia's brilliant Here Maps mobile app could tell them what we all know - the traffic overlay shows traffic density at near real-time, with free roads painted green, cloggy roads orange and jams outlined in a neat red. You can watch the morning developing quite nicely on your mobile in the comfort of your stationary car.

All roads east and south are routinely screwed, turning nicely red as the morning develops. The Road Formerly Known As The Emirates Road is a car park from about 6am onwards, stretching from the infamous National Paints (remember that 'it'll be done in April'? Yeah, right) all the way back to the airport road and beyond towards Ajman. The airport road bungs up, too - a combination of traffic leaving for the backed-up TRFKATER and the blinding sunrise on that wee bend before the university conspiring to cause it all to gum up back to Culture Roundabout.

Beirut's totally banjaxed, despite Dubai's sneaky Dhs4 collecting mechanism, while Al Wahda/Ittihad goes the same way (traffic backs up by the Faisal Street and Al Khan turnoffs first) from about 5.30am. Everyone hoys off from about 7am to take their kids to school so all roads East clog up very nicely thank you, with Anjads peeping and flailing at people as they try to smooth the way through key roundabouts of which Sharjah has many (and they're all called squares. Figure.).

The schools area - because zoning all schools together in an area with limited access is a clever idea - becomes a snarling mass of jostling entitlement. The Middle Road gums up from the schools area towards the city and again where it joins the Mileiha Road, because some genius at some time in recent history decided not to put in an intersection at the junction of two relatively new and planned major arterial roads, but instead plonk a chaos-inducing traffic light there instead.

This is all repeated, in reverse, in the evening, with TRFKATER south blocking up while the Northern lane jam stretches back to Mirdiff City Centre. The Middle Road access to TRFKATER then backs up.  Ittihad blocks up back to Garhoud and Nahda through Al Arouba Street just gets chicken oriental from about 4pm onwards. Basically, a lot of very unhappy and frustrated people gather and try to make themselves feel better by upsetting other people.

And it's all getting worse as we move back into mega-project announcing mode.

There we go, job done. No, no thanks necessary. This here matchbox contains your scheme appraisal framework. You just have to remember never to open it or it'll stop working. You can just pop that $4 million in my HSBC account and they'll somehow conspire to lose it or turn it into cat litter or something.

Oh Noes! Ramadan Traffic!

lumia (Photo credit: twicepix)

My life, certainly my sanity, has arguably been saved by Nokia Here Maps over the past few days. A mild curiosity - one of many packed into the excellent Lumia 920 I am using (wot Nokia's PR agency gave me to 'trial' and then 'forgot' to ask for back) - Here Maps has been a thing of great beauty as Ramadan has rendered the normally relatively predictable traffic patterns of the UAE truly Brownian.

The mornings have now changed from the 7-8am school run congestion to a post 9am get to work rush, while the afternoons appear to start with the lunchtime rush and never really die down up until 5 o'clock ish. Different roads are seeing different traffic densities as people try out alternatives, timings change as they try and avoid the worst of the congestion. You'd hardly think a great number of people had already left for the summer, but apparently they have.

It's all made things a bit unpredictable and for those, like me, fond of the open road, you have to get pretty witty. Which is where my mobile has been so very handy: Nokia's Here Maps, apart from being nicely accurate, contains a number of overlays - one of which shows the density of traffic. So you can skim along your intended route and check if its clear (green) a bit sticky (orange) or utterly banjaxed (red).

I have been doing that rather a lot recently - in fact every time I venture out. It has saved me countless hours of grief and frustration already...

What? No Smile You're In Sharjah?

Sharjah's famous 'Smile You're In Sharjah' roundabout is soon to be no more - a Dhs1 billion upgrade to the 'Al Jubail Intersection' is going to replace the current roundabout and it's clear from drawings released by Sharjah's public works department that the new roundabout, a combination of cloverleaf and swingabout (it is SO a proper word) will obliterate the flowery imprecation that has gladdened so many hearts over the decades. The drawing above was sourced by Gulf News from consultant WSP Middle East, which has proposed the scheme to ease the traffic issues that have dogged the roundabout in busy times.

The news also carries with it the prospect of some gnarly short term traffic issues - the roundabout serves Sharjah's central bus station and also intersects one of the two arterial roads that feed the city - Al Arouba Street. Although the long term effects of the upgrade are undoubtedly going to be positive, the short term holds nothing but snarling traffic jams and diversions. With the Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Road currently in a state of some considerable upheaval due to the roadworks around National Paints (not completed on April 15th as previously, insanely, predicted), that only really leaves the already packed Al Wahda Street. Things are going to get pretty dicey around here, trust me.

Whether we'll keep some floral version of the cheery 'Smile You're Insane' oops sorry, I meant 'Smile You're In Sharjah' when all that newness is completed is unclear. The journalists, as usual, didn't ask anyone the one question that mattered in the whole thing...

UAE Driving. We Need To Change The Moral Climate.

(Photo credits: smartsign.com)

There has been some disbelief expressed on Twitter this morning as The National's story on UAE national footballer Hamdan Al Kamali and his involvement in a new road safety campaign to ask reckless drivers to consider the people they'll leave behind. (Mind you, there's been more expressed about this rather silly post on The National's blog!)

Kamali's best friend, talented footballer and fellow member of the natioanal team Theyab Awana, died two years ago in a car crash when he ploughed into a parked lorry whilst texting. He was driving Kamali's car and was on the way to Kamali's house at the time he died. The two had grown up together, gone to training camp together.

Kamali freely admits he was a former 'bad boy' on the roads himself. He'd thought nothing about driving at 180kph and above. It is this that seems to have got Twitter in a twist (or, as Gulf News would have it, 'Twitter outrage') - why should we listen to a young man who quite clearly has no compunction about driving like a lunatic?

I find myself at odds with the tide of opinion. I don't think it's about whether we listen to him - it's about his peer group and whether they'll listen to him. The young men - and women - who look up to him, who would listen to a member of the national football team, of an age with themselves. Who would follow the example of a young man who holds his hand up and says, 'I did what you do every day. And I have had the opportunity, at an appalling personal price, to consider the consequence. And now I stand as an example for change.'

It think that's an incredibly powerful message. And it's timely. We're finding out that the law alone will not change things (it's all too infrequently applied. I was recently badly cut up by a speeding lunatic on the Emirates Road only to find out my aggressive friend was wearing a Dubai police officer's uniform). We have pretty much a radar every 2 kilometers and yet you'll still look around to find a Lexus or FJ Cruiser glued to your rear giving it disco lights when you're already topping out the speed limit including the 20kph 'grace'. And the accident rate on the UAE's roads is still unacceptably high - particularly among young Emiratis.

I was involved in a round table chat gig a couple of years ago at Dubai Men's College. People from the private sector are invited in just to chat with groups of students for a couple of hours. I quite enjoyed it and we all learned lots from each other. I was considerably taken aback when our chat moved to driving and my youthful friends started talking about the friends and relatives they had lost to mad driving. 'What can we do? It's in our blood! It's something we do, how we express ourselves.' were typical comments.

So Kamali, poacher turned gamekeeper, is surely worth a shot. If his campaign for drivers to consider others, not their victims on the road but family and friends - the ones they'll leave behind, results in even the slightest change in the moral environment, in attitudes towards driving in the UAE, it will have been well worthwhile.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in The National, the opinions of its Emirati 'speed freak' commentator are triggering more and more of a Twitter backlash, with Kipp Report finally giving us that 'Twitter outrage' story! :)

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?

National Paints Flyover Closed. Argh!

Dried green paint (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I've always wondered what effect having its brand associated with such a negative thing as an infamous cause of awful traffic congestion has had on National Paints.

Ever since it was built, the roundabout and flyover next to the National Paints factory have been known as 'National Paints Roundabout'. It's a charming tradition here that landmarks are frequently known by the company nearby - so we have Mothercat roundabout (after the Mothercat construction company), BMW roundabout and so on. These names are so much more colourful than the official names, particularly in Sharjah where all roundabouts are called squares. This caused a teacher friend of ours of twenty years' residency considerable pain and was, we think, a contributing factor in her decision to up sticks and go back to Blighty.

Every day the traffic piles up there, stretching in an unbroken line of multi-laned misery all the way back to the Sharjah Airport Road and even beyond - kilometres of snarled-up, lane-swapping traffic. Every day, tens of thousands of hapless commuters queue up, cars jostling to join any lane that looks like it might offer a marginal advantage over the others, be moving at slightly less of a snail's pace than the others.

At the core of the torment lies National Paints, a most admirable company whose name has become synonymous with horrible traffic jams.

Now Those In Authority are finally acting to remediate the bottleneck - the Emirates Road flyover at National Paints is to have extra lanes added and a long service road will cut down on congestion from joining traffic. the labour camp has already been built (it's behind Sharjah English School) and work will soon commence on what will be a major overhaul of one of the two key arterial routes between Dubai and the Northern Emirates (the other one being the E611).

Which means, from June 22nd, trouble. And plenty of it...

Chaos, Ajman Style

Image via WikipediaI pootled off to Ajman City Centre this morning to get some bits and bobs. Imagine my surprise to find the road diverted at Gulf Craft, the big flyover on the Ajman/Umm Al Qawain Road has been totally sealed off and is surrounded by acres of red and white striped concrete blocks, flapping safety tape and bollards. The diversions are enormous, utterly counter-intuitive and the signage has been organised by someone who obviously believes in some arcane school of thought transference rather than anything as mundane as clear written communication.

The result is a most marvellous chaos, a cross between Wacky Races and the Gumball rally as drivers try and Get In Lane (without really knowing which lane to Get In), jostle for position and change their minds at the last minute when they realise that the signs that say 'Centre of the City' don't actually mean 'City Centre', they mean the centre of Ajman. Every now and then, bemused-looking policemen have been deployed, presumably just so there's a witness to what chaos looks like when slathered thickly on a substrate of chaos before being topped with chaotic, Brownian hundreds and thousands.

Eventually I slow down for one particularly nasty snarl-up of bemused and increasingly irritable drivers (some of whom have by now become quite familiar to me) to call out of the window, using my finest Ten Word Arabic, at a policeman.  He shrugs his shoulders and laughs, agreeing that this is all 'too much problem'.

So there you go. Avoid Northern Ajman. It's a total mess.

Fatal

Image via WikipediaNice story in today's jolly The National claims the Gulf's road safety record is 'appalling'. They're right, too. According to the piece, which quotes figures from the 2009 Global Status Report on Road Safety, you're seven times more likely to be killed on the UAE's roads than the UKs.

If you don't like it, you know what you can do, people...

Speakers at the Road Safety Middle East conference, speakers appeared slightly baffled that the Middle East bucked global trends in that the wealthier the country gets in the region, the worse the fatality record. Traffic accidents are the leading cause of death for the 15 to 29 age group, apparently. And the UAE averages 37.1 road fatalities per 100,000 people compared to a global average of 18.8.

The story's linked here. It's statistically sobering stuff.

The Middle Way

Image via WikipediaThere's some interesting localised chaos breaking out in Sharjah as people start to get used to the new 'middle road' which starts by the Mahatta Fort museum and snakes out to cross the Emirates Road and then merge with the Mileiha Road. The problem is that this merging takes place not with a nice, sensible clover-leaf exchange but with a traffic light. The volume of traffic skipping out of the central city on its way to the E611 Dubai Bypass (the only truly clear route into Dubai of a morning) is increasing exponentially daily.

The accidents are starting to pile up quite nicely. The access to the 'schools area' from the Middle Road is already creating a daily tailback of quite alarming proportions. And the traffic merging into the Mileiha Road does so just outside the gates of Sharjah English School. Adding to this growing chaos, Sharjah's elite Anjad police force have started to pitch up and muck around with various experiments to see what can be done to improve things. This means you never quite know which route to take as U-turns are blocked, roads diverted and sundry other manifestations of Anjaddery take place.

What could be nicer than to surround a busy little school with snarling, choking throngs of heavy, aggressive commuter traffic? When you add the earth-movers, heavy lorries and bulk carriers escaping from Sharjah's industrial areas, the chaos only grows. At least we can take some comfort that the whole road network, including this little piece of madness, wasn't planned and built by a world class and highly respected British consultancy and construction company that should, surely, have known better than to join two arterial roads with a traffic light outside a school.

Oh...

Information Overload

Image by Getty Images via @daylife
You could perhaps feel sorry for Dubai's RTA (Road and Transport Authority) faced as it is (and doubtless many other such authorities around the world) with having bought huge, wildly expensive traffic information screens that flash up bitty messages using LED technology. Given the relatively low resolution of the screens, they are only able to show a couple of lines of text - although they are bilingual, which is a good thing.


Someone at the RTA has the unenviable task of thinking up messages to post on the things and there have been signs recently of a certain tendency to surreal, Situationist-like sloganeering. The most recent, giving way yesterday and today to an Arabic only greeting for Sheikh Khalifa (who has just returned to the UAE following medical treatment), was 'SCHOOLS WITHOUT ACCIDENTS'.


That one's stayed with me. What could it mean?

Spangles

Image by Johnny Grim via Flickr
The tradition of scattering little pieces of glass all over the roads during Ramadan sadly seems set to continue this year. Driving past a smashed car on the Deira side of Business Bay bridge this morning, the driver apparently alive but nursing a nasty nosebleed, I was only surprised that it was the first major accident I have actually witnessed in the first days of this long, hot fast. I know it won't be the last - in fact, three people have already died on Dubai's roads in the first three days of Ramadan.

This Ramadan is a trial indeed - the Fajr prayer which commences the fast takes place at around 4.30am and Maghrib, the prayer that marks Iftar, the breaking of the fast, takes place at around 6.50pm - so people are fasting for something a little over fourteen hours a day. The fast means that nothing may pass your lips, so we're talking no eating, drinking (no, not even water) or smoking. When the ambient temperature's creeping into the mid forties (that's 110F to Americans), fourteen hours is long, long time. And it's debilitating - as the days pass, the cumulative effect on people's systems is plain to see.

A road full of tired, distracted and physically weakened drivers means that everyone has a huge additional duty of care - not only those fasting, but those who are not but who could give their fellow drivers a little more leeway than usual.

Dubai's Road and Transport Authority has launched an awareness campaign designed to highlight the extra care that drivers should take in Ramadan, which appears to consist of some leaflets (according to this story in Gulf News) and using the traffic information system displays. The need for these huge and no doubt expensive displays have long mystified me, although I'm sure I'm alone in thinking of them as Mostly Pointless. Everyone else no doubt likes the occasional aphorism, national day greeting and, very occasionally, advice that the traffic is slow - usually the only entertainment while waiting in the tailback stretching under the sign.

Today's message reads, in English, "Take care of other's fault" - and yes, I am so small-minded as to complain about the illiterate rendering of the message. Whether you should be exhorted to take care of others' faults or looking to take more care yourself is also worthy of debate.

But a few leaflets and a wonky message are simply not enough. Between the tolls and fees it raises, the RTA must surely have the resources to launch a serious public awareness campaign that could at least have a chance of alleviating this awful and totally avoidable carnage.

One component of it could be a concerted effort to create a strong moral climate condemning the fools putting others' lives at risk when they dash carelessly home for Iftar, seemingly convinced for some reason that they are rendered temporarily immune from the consequences of their selfishness.

Radar, radar everywhere

Image via Wikipedia

It's interesting to see the backlash against fixed radar on British roads. The most recent news, albeit broken in the fascist's friend, The Daily Mail, is that Wiltshire town Swindon has scrapped fixed radars. Getting flashed on a British road means a £50 fine (about Dhs300, which is a snip compared to the rather more lavish fines doled out in the Emirates, which start at double that and rise depending on how much faster you're travelling.

Swindon's town council reacted to the news last October that the lucrative fines revenue would go direct to central government in Whitehall by withdrawing the lot of them, thereby underpinning the popular view that fixed radars were more about revenue than road safety.

Since the move, Swindon's roads have actually become safer - quarterly statistics show no fatalities since the radars were removed (the quarter before, with radars, there was a single fatality). Over the same periods speeding fines went down from 2,227 to 1,033 - hardly a surprise - the 1,033 fines came from mobile camera deployments.

This news adds to the increasing chorus from those in the UK who believe that fixed cameras have no effect whatsoever on road safety - an argument that could well apply to the streets of Dubai, where higher fines and stricter enforcement have undoubtedly had an effect on road mortality rates. The question as to whether having the highest penetration of fixed traffic cameras in the world today is about revenue or safety is one that does tend to nag me.

The Mail also carries the story of an unknown radar bomber who has taken the motorist's ultimate revenge, which I quite enjoyed. It's here.

Win a Cow's Aorta! Now Extended!

Image via Wikipedia

The Roads and Traffic Authority of Dubai has extended the deadline for entries to the Dubai Sustainable Transport Award. It would appear that not enough people want to win a silver-plated segment from a cow's aorta.

Perhaps interestingly, snuck in the very bottom of the press release issued by the RTA announcing the extension, there are two subsidiary awards this year, as well as the four key awards (I'm not going to list them, if you're interested more info is here).

The second subsidiary award is for 'Best Media Coverage'. According to the RTA, the award "relates to the media coverage of events, activities and news of the Award. This Award is designed for the government, semi-government and private media organizations."

So you get an award for covering the awards. Neat. I can't wait to see which journalist will step up to receive an award for the most slavish, extensive, praise-laden and blindly approving piece of witless, saccharine hagiography.

Oh, sorry. I meant 'most incisive and independent evaluation of the awards, their objectives and success in meeting those targets'.

It just came out wrong.

Flash!

Lemmy Kilmister via last.fm

Since Dubai Police went on their radar rampage, I have taken to using cruise control most of the time and it has undoubtedly saved me thousands of Dirhams. It saved me another few hundred this morning, coming down the Awir road out of the desert and into Dubai and passing the evil, hunchbacked dwarf in a green uniform who’d set up his mobile speed camera behind the big blue road sign.

I’d barely passed him when I saw a Hiace van coming up behind me, parked on my tail and flashing me to pull over. I was travelling at a carefully calibrated 119km/h and the road’s speed limit at that point is 100km/h. It is customary for Dubai Police to set radars at 20km/h above the limit, wot they calls 'the cushion'. So if I was being a tad naughty, my good friend in the Hiace was being unusually naughty.

I hate minivans. I hate that maniacal morons with single digit brain-cell counts and Lemmy’s taste for speed drive them, let alone that they have a high centre of gravity and frequently add to that inherent instability by being packed to the gunwales with workers.

I’d like to see ‘em taken off the roads – they caused 21% of all traffic fatalities in Dubai this year, including the horrific accident in Lahbab, the desert truck stop further out towards Hatta on the very road I was on. At the least I’d like to see ‘em confined to the inside lane.

Meanwhile, matey boy was giving me the full ‘I’m a sheikh, move over’ treatment, literally within a couple of feet of my bumper, his lights pumping.

So I did a bad thing, people. I could see the fixed speed camera looming into sight ahead of us and I graciously pulled over to let Speedy Keen past. He was hunched over the wheel, his tongue out and drooling as he passed me by, his cargo looking down at me as they shot past.

Bam.

I watched his arms fly up in the universal ‘I don’t believe it! Why me? Of all the damn things!’ gesture.

And I was glad. And I did show him I was glad.

Sorry. Two traffic-related posts in one month is the sign of a rogue, but that's how the dice fall sometimes...