A major issue that people living in and visiting Dubai must deal with is the huge amount of traffic and the resulting congestion on its roads. Often, major roads, especially in urban centers, become gridlocked with traffic, making it difficult or impossible for people to reach their destinations. A major contributing factor to this congestion is the traffic resulting from students being transported to school.
Morning times are especially chaotic when it comes to traffic flow in Dubai. With everyone rushing to get to work all at once, roads become congested and even small accidents can stop the flow of traffic for hours. When school traffic, especially busses that make frequent stops in urban areas, is added to this, the problem becomes even worse. Accidents involving busses are on the rise, and are becoming a serious concern for the safety and wellbeing of the Emirate’s children. A single accident involving a bus during rush-hour traffic in Sharjah injured 7 people and killed the bus’s driver.
School traffic also has a negative impact on business, causing people to be late to work or to not be able to make it at all sometimes. In a single example, school bus traffic (exacerbated) by rush hour and some road construction created a deadlock that blocked access to the Jumeriah Lakes Towers residential and business area. People were unable to enter or leave this area for nearly three hours and many eventually gave up on reaching their work at all that day. Also, many arguments and confrontations broke out between traffic officials and motorists. 50,000 people were directly affected by this single instance of school traffic related congestion, and this huge impact is causing many to consider unorthodox solutions to this problem.
The police have proposed that the school day in Dubai start later (around 9:00) so most of the rush-hour traffic is already off the road when the busses start to use it. This has been met with much opposition though because people believe that a later school day is harmful to students and that traffic should not be allowed to dictate their childrens’ educations. Students, they claim, work and learn better earlier in the morning and may be adversely affected by the heat toward the end of a later school day. Some parents also complain that this would cause issues in the mornings because they would have to be at work before their children would be able to meet the bus. A test program for start the school day later was instituted, however, in Al Ain for six months that was successful enough that it has been made permanent.
Regardless of the opinions surrounding the relationship between school traffic and road congestion in Dubai, the problem appears to only be getting worse and must be addressed.
(Information for this article came from thenational.ae)
