ARE YOU READY FOR THE UAE’S TRANSPORT REVOLUTION?
Flying taxis, self-driving cars, and a 12-minute journey from Abu Dhabi to Dubai are all closer to reality than you may think. James Langton reports
It is 2027. You have an urgent appointment in Abu Dhabi at 9am and you have only just left your flat on Palm Jebel Ali at 8.30am. So, plenty of time then.
The drone taxi you ordered by the RTA app is hovering. It’s only a couple of minutes to the hyperloop station at Al Maktoum International Airport, where the 8.40am service gets you to Reem Island Central in 12 minutes.
From there another driverless taxi – a Tesla – ordered on the Careem app picks you up for your meeting.
You are five minutes early for the appointment, which turns out to have been cancelled 10 minutes after you left home.
Ah well, you can’t have everything.
A flight of fancy? Visions of the future often have a way of failing to materialise as expected. Back in the 1950s, magazines such as Popular
Mechanics imagined the skies of today filled with spaceships on their way to Mars with a trip to the shops in the family autogyro.
This time it feels different. It is not just that advances in technology now make a transport revolution possible, but also that there is the will to make it all happen, especially in the UAE.
This country has a way of catching and overtaking the world from the fast lane. Take the electric car. For years, it was nothing more than a novelty in a country whose prosperity had been founded on hydrocarbons, while in China sales reached more than 700,000 a year.
Suddenly Tesla has come to town, launching a showroom for its entire range, including the mass-market Model 3 later this year. There are charging stations springing up across the Emirates and electric is the cool kid on the road.
Then there is hyperloop, the supersonic transport system that shoots pods in a tube faster than a passenger jet. Some are sceptical about the practicability of this untested concept. Yet the UAE has two hyperlink projects under development – one from Abu Dhabi to Dubai and the other from the capital to Al Ain.
In Dubai, we are promised flying taxis using two-person drones that will begin testing later in the year, and driverless vehicles that in less than 15 years will account for one in four journeys in the emirate.
Some of these will be taxis, again developed by Tesla, the company created by the billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, whose cars will become a familiar sight on our streets this year, powered by the UAE’s growing network of charging stations. At Abu Dhabi’s Umm Al Emarat Park, electric cars have reserved parking spaces.
It was Abu Dhabi’s Masdar City where we were introduced to an autonomous vehicle, the podcar, in 2010. Now nearby Yas Island is preparing to move visitors to its growing collection of theme
parks using pods running on magnetic levitation. The plan is to connect the pods to the new terminal at the international airport.
There are still some areas where progress is slower. Etihad Rail once promised a network of passenger and freight services that would connect not just the UAE’s major cities, but with routes across the entire GCC and beyond.
These ambitions have since been scaled back, with the only operating route transporting sulphur from Habshan to Ruwais.
In this vision of the future, there are also a few blind spots. Anyone who has experienced the morning rush hour in Abu Dhabi will be aware that the city would greatly benefit from a more developed public transport system.
Long promised, the first stages of what would be a 131-kilometre metro network were originally due to begin operation next year – but work has yet to start. Hopefully, the first trains will be running in our hypothetical transport future of 2027.
The journey begins here.