As Dubai Metro turns 17, so does a lifetime of memories

I was twelve, the first time I tapped a Nol card at Dubai Airport Freezone metro station, backpack heavier than it needed to be, uniform still creased from my mother's iron, and I didn’t realize I was boarding not just a train, but the next fourteen years of my life.

As Dubai Metro marked its seventeenth anniversary, I reminisced 14 years of my childhood, teenage and even adult life. Dubai Metro has been less a mode of transport and more a witness to my growth.

Joining me on my routine from school exams to university hunts, from job interviews to the first "real" commute of my career: Dubai Metro redefined my stories. The city that reinvents its skyline every few years, had one constant: the Red and Green Line with the same AC hum, the same robotic "door is closing," the same window view that slowly filled in with towers I watched go up floor by floor. The crowd changed, number of seats changed, and even the volume of trains increased, but the routines remained.

Day began with a bunch of school kids rushing in, fighting for seats. Every adult in the cabin wished for peace, as chatters filled the ladies’ compartment. After school, the station became our hub, the place where we'd trade plans for the evening and split the snacks someone had smuggled along. We dreaded the "No Eating" sticker glaring at us from the train walls.

By 2017, we were a little more composed, a little more self-assured. But what didn’t change was sprinting up the stairs at Oud Metha station, record books tucked under one arm, sometimes swapped for a book from the library.

But the memory that stays in my heart forever is my best friend and I, in our farewell outfits at the Burjuman station: Green Line, Platform 3, towards Etisalat (renamed E&). Nothing about the station had changed except the advertisements, yet everything about that moment was different. We were now called ‘young adults’, a term coined to instill a sense of responsibility in the hearts of high schoolers. But if only metro could speak for itself, would the world know the stories of 'high schoolers 101’.

I was hunched over Google Maps, plotting the cheapest and fastest route like it was the only way to save the world. ADCB station. I must have zoomed in and out of that route a dozen times, mentally rehearsing the walk, the platform change, the exit I'd need, as if getting it wrong would somehow cost me the interview. From then on, metro saw me dressed well, tired, confused, sad and even excited. Over the next five years, destinations changed but not the mode.

I made friends with strangers on the Dubai Mall/ Burj Khalifa station platform over discussion on how much the crowd had changed on the metro. We would skip a few trains to let the rush die down, then exchange numbers or Instagram handles, promising to say hi if we ever crossed paths again. But somehow, we never did.

Dubai metro witnessed quieter moments of my life, like my fiancé's nervous confession, and the happy station staff to whom I gave a rose on valentines’ day.

Yet, as I take my next metro to Dubai Investment Park, what one could speak of is the safety and freedom this mode of transport offers. Seventeen years of service to over a 136.5 million metro users during the first half of 2026, yet for me, it always came down to the kind faces of officers who'd help us out when we forgot to recharge our metro cards, or when we lost a schoolbook somewhere on the platform, in 2016.