Moving Dubai en masse

Dubai: Despite initial glitches and challenges, Dubai Metro has changed the lifestyle of thousands of residents in the emirate within one month of its operation.

Gulf News kept tracking the day to day Metro operations in terms of ridership, comfort, convenience and glitches and reached the conclusion that the overall performance of the Metro was better than expectations.

The punctuality rate was 83 per cent while around 1.5 million passengers used the Metro within one month. The ratio of service availability was more than 93 per cent while passengers were blamed for causing major glitches as they pushed the emergency button during the first few days of operation.

"We got very good responses from passengers and it speaks volumes about the success of the Metro project," said a senior official at the Rail Agency of the Dubai Roads and Transport Authority (RTA). He said the number of passengers is expected to go down a bit as the joy ride period is almost over.

He said that the maximum number of passengers a day touched more than 97,000 during Eid holidays while the minimum number was 42,000.

As far as the revenue is concerned, more than 150,000 Nol Cards (Silver and Gold) were sold during the first 25 days of the Metro and more than 300,000 Nol Red Ticket (single journey tickets) were sold during the same period.

"Our main challenge now is to increase the ridership, educate passengers about rules and regulations of the rail system, and to create awareness on how to use the Metro system effectively," added the official.

According to the latest RTA figures, a total of 1,316,319 passengers used the Metro in 23 days from its official public launch on September 10 to October 2. This breaks down to an average of around 57,273 passengers per day, which is far less than the expected figure.

The RTA expected to have 59,500 passengers per day per direction but achieved less than half the target.

"We have more passengers using the train to go to the shopping malls or just to joy ride while there are very few passengers using the train for work because only 10 stations have opened and there are only 11 trains on the tracks," said the official.

He said the targeted ridership would be achieved once all the stations were opened with more than 44 trains on the track as it would be more practical for passengers to use it to make trips to their workplaces.

Problems

Gulf News also noticed that issues related to the Nol Cards, especially problems of topping-up, incidents of overcharging, broken vending machines and faulty card readers on public buses, also kept many prospective passengers away from using the Metro.

Irregular timings of feeder buses and lack of passenger education about using the integrated transport system were also some of the main reasons for fewer passengers, especially during peak hours when people feared being late for the office.

The passenger figures from September 10 to October 2 revealed that the Metro did not attract a huge amount of passengers from the airport as the Terminal 3 Station recorded the least numbers — 44,490 passengers.

Stations attached to shopping malls recorded the highest numbers with the Mall of the Emirates topping the list with 246,035 passengers, followed by Khalid Bin Al Waleed Station (BurJuman) with 182,035 passengers, Al Rashidiya with 178,364 passengers, Nakheel Harbour and Tower with 152,265 passengers, Union Square with 145,643 passengers and Deira City Centre with 129,665 passengers.

"The main lesson we have learnt during the first part of the operation is to educate people, teach them manners about using the Metro and to ensure the smooth link of the public buses with the Metro," said another RTA official.