Azizi Riviera

Infrastructure 2 min read

A 500-metre bridge opens at the Trade Centre, and the last one comes in October

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A district on the canal is judged by the twenty minutes at the other end of the journey, not by the view from the balcony. Those twenty minutes are being rebuilt.

What opened at the Trade Centre

A 500-metre, two-lane bridge carrying traffic from Dubai World Trade Centre and One Central towards Al Mustaqbal Street and the Za’abeel Palace Street intersection. On event days the RTA puts the saving at ten minutes down to two.

The scheme it belongs to

The Al Mustaqbal Street Development Project, at AED 633 million, includes 2,000 metres of bridges and tunnels and widens Al Mustaqbal Street from three lanes to four in each direction. Capacity rises 33%, from 6,600 to 8,800 vehicles per hour, and the modelled journey falls from 13 minutes to 6.

What is still to come

Overall completion is past 50%; work at the World Trade Centre Roundabout is past 85%. A further bridge was due at the end of August, the fifth and final bridge of the roundabout scheme is set for October 2026, and three tunnels totalling 1,500 metres follow in February 2027.

Who the bridge is for

Mattar Al Tayer, Director General of the RTA, framed the works as part of an integrated scheme to «accommodate urban development and population growth». The RTA counts around 500,000 residents and visitors across the World Trade Centre, DIFC, Downtown Dubai and Business Bay as the beneficiaries.

For anyone living along the canal, the number to watch is not the bridge but the tunnels in February 2027, because that is when the scheme stops taking capacity away while it adds it. Interim stages of a grade-separation project routinely make peak-hour journeys worse than the before case: traffic is diverted onto temporary alignments, and the new bridge feeds a junction downstream that has not been rebuilt yet. Expect the honest improvement to arrive after the last tunnel, not after the last bridge. The second point is about which trip actually improves. This scheme is aimed at the Trade Centre and Za’abeel movements, so it helps the run into DIFC and Downtown and does very little for the Al Khail and Ras Al Khor legs that carry the other half of the district’s commuting. Those are separate projects on separate timetables, and a resident choosing between two apartments should be asking which corridor they will be on at eight in the morning rather than reading a citywide headline about congestion.

Source: Dubai Media Office checked against the source

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