Dubai: Employees face 30-minute parking delays due to traffic
Daily commutes for thousands of commuters have been marred by lengthy interruptions inside Business Bay, DIFC, and other avenues of the like.
Like most of the residents do take out more than half an hour of buffer time just to get to their places and so the traffic around the offices and business centers in Dubai has been escalating even more.
Business Bay and the rest of administrative and business districts including DIFC and Deira have been common areas of sought after places for many against the problem of ticks on daily movement.
Awais Ahmed works as an engineer at the Bay Tower situated along Marasi Drive, Business Bay. Often, he says, majority of his coworkers have to endure the unpleasant peak hours traffic before they are able to get their cars from the office parking lot.
“More than 30 minute is spent just getting out of the parking space area for peak traffic hour situations,” he recounted, “The streets that lead to the parking space are all honking with one vehicle after another moving up the more than 30 minute uphill driveway”.
Last week, many residential communities got traffic because only one entry and exit point was prevailing for each unit. On the contrary, those who work in areas where there are business activities say that they have the same problems even when there are many in and out points.
Ahmed asserted that even getting out of the parking way took longer than expected due to traffic. “Once you are on Marasi Drive, you breathe a sigh of relief, but that’s short-lived,” he said. “It takes over 25 minutes to get onto Al Khail Road or other expressways, then another 40 minutes to finally reach my home in Al Nahda.”
Habitual visitors to these parts of the city hope that the new measures that are coming up will improve the ever-worsening congestion in the city.
Most of us who commute through these clogged areas on a daily basis are very optimistic that the current infrastructural maintenance spikes and the proposals to the problems will in the end rectify the ever increasing problem of traffic in the city’, an engineer who is 35 years of age retorts.
Arfaz Iqbal, who works in media and lives in DIFC, says that for some time in the DIC area, traffic has become congested, which has turned his previously easy commute to work into a daily challenge.
“Within the previous two months, congestion in that area has been horrific. It was previously discovered beginning from 8.30am, however, as early as 5.30am there are already more cars out. Every internal road is chock-a-block from 8 in the morning until 10.30 in the morning. The evening build up begins at around 4pm and heights up till 8 pm,” said Iqbal.
“Some days, to reach the highway Abu Dhabi from the parking of DIFC, I have driven just 2-3 kilometers for one and one half hours."
He added that it is worse if there are events in the World Trade Centre, Dubai. Because of this, he has been faced with a situation where he has to use the metro instead of driving and even weekend seems too busy now as there are many restaurants in the vicinity.
“Every outing nowadays, this is traffic it seems for every outing, I need to leave a buffer time of about 20 minutes because of the traffic now.”
Commuters stuck in traffic for hours
This traffic nightmare is not confined to only Business Bay or DIFC. Aaban Alizai, an automobile spare parts dealer who resides in Abu Hail explained that he experiences a similar situation while commuting to Baniyas Street in Deira. “The bus situation when you depart after 9 am in Deira is worse,” he said.
“Baniyas Street, Deira Creek, Al Ras, Naif etc, all are blocked. In fact, it takes me thirty minutes to negotiate just the market area,” recollected Alizai.
Alizai also said that sometimes he drives as far as the Creek and then walks the remaining 2km to his office because of the frustration of getting caught in the traffic. “Summer is about over now, so this I can do more often to avoid traffic,” he added.
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