It's been an interesting two weeks, what with the new Dubai Metro and all. I have to say, though, Dubai did a really good job. The objective was to have the train up and running and ready for passengers on 09.09.09 at 09.09.09 PM. And that is exactly what happened. The fares are also reasonable but the Student Card is the BOMB. The fares are really cheap and it's really good for us students. Boy, is it fast. It takes about 19 minutes to cover a distance that would take around 40 minutes by car. And there's no Salik toll! Faaaaaaabulous. There are, however, some kinks in the system. Sometimes the card readers don't work. Sometimes the scene is very Jumanji-esque. One of the prime locations/stations is Mall of the Emirates (MOE) which is conjoined. That mall is very huge and has about, let's say, 200 thousand gazillion visitors. Ergo, the MOE station is always bombarded with people getting on the train. It's a lot more convenient than buses and taxis (the minimum fare for taxis is now 10 dhs, even if the meter shows 5 dhs). The metro stops running at 11pm which is a bit of a drawback because it would be nice to be able to take the metro at any time at all. It's rather annoying to have to check-in and check-out on the buses. I keep forgetting to check out. And the fares are calculated according to the distance (viz. zones) that you travel across. So a bus ride that normally cost AED 2 would now cost maximum AED 5.80. Majorly disappointing. The bright side is that within 30 minutes of your train journey, you can have a free bus ride. Woohoo! Yay for free stuff! But I think the free bus ride depends on the zones you've travelled by train. I've given up driving the car and am now using the metro to get to places. The Metro is now a part of our lives. Mine, at least. There were about 110,000 passengers during the first two days of the metro. That is INSAAAAAAAAAAAAAANE man! They've probably crossed about 250,000 in this first week. The train kinda breaks down sometimes. But it's been rare. It's happened on 2 train journeys so far. One time, the train broke down for 2 hours and another time, it was for maybe maximum 30 minutes. The Train Lady announced that the bus would stop at Jafliya instead of Rashidiya, which is 5 stops away. But after a while, they fixed the technical problem and went on the usual route. I got off at Jafliya anyway since it was really crowded in the train. I think that in a while, when the excitement dies down a bit, the number of people boarding trains will also come down. I think that there should be like some sort of maximum number of passengers they allow on the trains. One time, they were stopping us in batches because the trains for so full. That wasn't ideal though. They were stopping us in the middle of nowhere and everyone was just standing next to everyone, with sticky skin. But I guess they had to manage the crowd. It really was immensely populated in there. I would suggest they make people wait in seated areas. AND inform the crowd of what was going on. None of us knew what was happening and it was ennerving.
But the metro is as smooooooth as silk.
Like halwa.
Kudos to Dubai for having set targets. Targets so set that predetermined the date and time of opening, to the dot. All of this within 4 years. And 9 years of planning. Kuuuu-dos.
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