Carpooling in Dubai

June 5th, 2008
Leave your comment Posted by umar
Published in textblog

For those who don’t know, carpooling is the process of sharing a car among multiple people to use it for commuting.

In many countries of the world, carpooling is encouraged and appreciated because it reduces the number of cars on roads. There are designated High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lanes (usually the fastest lane) on highways so that carpools can cruise through the traffic quickly. Some governments offer fuel rebates to registered carpools. There are carpooling clubs and organizations so that drivers and passengers can find each other to make a carpool. All of that to reduce traffic and control pollution and fuel consumption along with other benefits.

In Dubai, the government is still trying to figure out whether it wants to encourage and support carpooling or not. Someone in government is confusing carpooling with private taxis, thinking it would hurt the revenue generated by taxis. Obviously, that’s not the case. Carpooling is done by people who know each other and plan in advance their pickup points and routes. These days the government is trying to come up with a system to regulate carpooling. At first it was thinking about having the drivers register their cars and passengers with RTA and get formal permission to share their car with others. Of course, that’s not a practical idea and would prove to discourage carpooling instead of encouraging it. Soon they realized that it was a bad idea. So they back peddled and clarified that only those need to register who pick up passengers they don’t know (aka private taxi). This raised questions as to whether they want to legalize private taxis, and how this all will be enforced.

Till date, RTA is still trying to figure out how best to solve this issue.

In my opinion, RTA should not touch this. Everyone knows carpooling is a good thing. This is not an issue at first place. However, to control illegal taxis, the best thing RTA can do is increase the number of taxis and buses, and make such a system that anyone looking for taxi can get it within few minutes. When no one would want private taxis, they will die their own death.

It’s that simple, if only RTA realized that.

Related posts:

  1. Dubai Metro Starts
  2. Dubai Metro is coming along pretty well
  3. Late Warning
  4. Fog on Emirates Road
  5. The word in Dubai – Survive


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  • Sheza
    well increasing the number of taxis instead of encouraging carpooling would kill their environment. plus, carpooling lanes should encourage colleagues and friends to go together. big deal if they're like private taxis. even by banning private taxis, the traffic issues will not disappear.
  • waqas
    You never mentioned anything about the public transport system in Dubai on your blog.

    Public transport (buses, subways, etc) goes a long way in reducing traffic congestion. It has the same effect as carpooling, but on a much larger scale. Mass transit is more efficient, better organized, predictable, better for the environment, and cheaper, compared to both carpooling and taxis.
  • I never mentioned it because it doesn't exist. Not a decent one at least, something that is reliable. Dubai Metro is under construction until September 2009. I have already written a lot about taxis. Buses are even worse. I did write about my experience of traveling by bus during my early days in Dubai.
  • waqas
    That seems to be a rather severe oversight by the Dubai authorities, given the kind of traffic problems Dubai has...
  • True that... that's what you get for rapid growth without having the resources to keep up with it.
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