UAE: Stricter car ownership rules proposed to ease traffic between Dubai, Sharjah
Dubai's vehicle growth rate has crossed the 8 per cent mark, well above the global figure of 2 percent, according to the Minister of Energy and Infrastructure.
Suhail Al Mazrouei has described this increase as abnormal and pointed out that changes must be introduced into policies and legislation on vehicle ownership and registration to resolve the problem.
Al Mazrouei said: "The Ministry has also called for including the issue in the Annual Meetings of the UAE Government to device all means on enhancing coordination with local authorities.
Al Mazrouei also added that the Ministry is heading a specialized team consisting of local governments and the Ministry of Interior to study the issue in considerable detail. The ministry has already put forward some of the ways the problem could be handled to the Cabinet and has been in cooperation with the local bodies to discuss the solution.
Plans also include upgrading road corridors linking Dubai to other emirates, building new highways, better integrating nationwide mass transit systems, and adding new types of public transport.
Mazrouei's comments came in response to a question posed by FNC member Adnan Al Hammadi about the increasing congestion between Dubai and Sharjah (by coincidence, he raised the very same issue more than a year ago).
Al Hammadi, also reminded, that “More than a year earlier, we were shown that the ministry had prepared the necessary studies, and for engineering solutions to address the traffic jams on the roads in the UAE and that projects will be implemented during the second half of the year 2024 — to facilitate traffic and ease bottlenecks.” Traffic has been immobilised, especially in the cities of Dubai and Sharjah, but what is the ministry doing with the growing problem of traffic?
Al Mazrouei, however, clarified this in a response, stating, "Development work on some of the priority federal corridors began in 2024 and is underway yet."
Al Hammadi retorted, “This response was pre-covid, over a year and a half earlier." Pushing the internal question, he asked: "The question is: When will we pick this point back up again? And when will those answers be seen amongst us?
"It is unfortunate that when the minister talked about proposed solutions, the law had a part only in the context of organizing the traffic movement and did not talk about the reasons behind this traffic crisis related to the urban and increasing number of vehicles."
Dubai has an 8 per cent vehicle growth rate but in total the increase of vehicles is up to 23 per cent across Sharjah, Ajman and Umm Al Quwain, he said. This, he said, poses a grave threat to the region.
He also pointed to the 1.2 million cars that now enter Dubai each day, compared with just 850,000 a year and a half back, while the Dubai Traffic and Licensing Department issues about 4,000 new driver s licences a day. "What ways can we turn this crisis into an opportunity to have convenient solutions to prevent us from facing this dilemma in the first place?" Al Hammadi asked.
Al Hammadi also emphasised the knock-on effect congestion has in terms of time lost and wasted time, citing motorists as an example. An employee loses 460 hours of driving between Dubai and Sharjah — 60 working days driving on the road — one-third of the total working days, he added.
Al Hammadi said federal government employees leave their home to work after dawn prayers and return home after 8pm. "Can you imagine Emirati employees waiting in mosques, car parks and cafes for traffic to ease before returning back home?
He also pointed out that other have had to rent temporary apartments or share accommodation closer to their offices in Dubai to escape the long journeys. He then said that "we are fed-up with this thing and require an immediate solution".
That traffic congestion on those roads is a never-ending and traumatic issue, a noun that all road users are in pain since the sweating from heat wave and the sweating from stress due to the traffic congestion happen at the same time, and we need urgent resolutions! However, Ellison noted: "this problem has been raised numerous times before, and until now we have not received satisfactory resolution to this issue." “It is not my job as an FNC member to interrogate the minister and suggest solutions, and I only represent the concerns and demands of the public,” he said.
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