[LINK] "I'd rather go by bus. There is nothing nicer in the world than a bus. - Prince Charles"

[rfmcdonald]

dubaiwalla's most recent links post, besides including an array of fantastic photos of Dubai, examines in detail Dubai's public transit system, its recent changes, and its continued problems.

[T]he government ordered over a thousand buses. While the old ones were generally adequate, the new ones are uniformly shiny. While I have yet to see the onboard information screens work as designed, they will one day give travelers route information. A large number of them are either double-decker or articulated. This will be important in September, when the metro disgorges large numbers of people on to the streets at once. If commuters can't trust buses to get them near their houses and workplaces reliable and in comfort, they will not use them. The metro will then be of very limited use outside the central business district, and will not do much to alleviate traffic on the city's main north-south corridor. New bus routes now serve the vast majority of the city, at least as it stands today. In an effort to make sure commuters have no excuse to avoid the buses, the city has built air conditioned stops, put up route maps at each of them, and started running buses through the night, with varying levels of success. Punctuality has been a serious problem in the past, not least due to congestion. The sheer number of new buses will probably serve as a brute-force solution to this problem. In other words, the schedules may still mean little, and a given bus might still be 45 minutes late, but if you can expect a bus every 10 minutes instead of every hour, it does not matter all that much. Currently, bus transfers and day passes do not exist at all. The only reform in that department in the past few years has been the institution of a flat AED 2 (55¢) fare for all buses in the city. Luckily, the electronic payment machines already visible on newer buses will be linked to the fare card system for the upcoming metro in order to allow for various discount schemes.

Go, read it in full.