The Sojourner

Driving in Dubai and the Emirates can be a challenge, apart from the erratic and often dangerous practices of fellow motorists.

The highway system in the Emirates has been produced in less than fifteen years.  It was largely designed by engineers from the West.  The most prominent traffic control feature is the roundabout.  Roundabouts have been adopted because it is believed that four-way stops would totally baffle the local drivers.  Some have interesting features like four lanes in and three lanes out.  When you are aware of these quirks, it is great to study the neophyte drivers.

Another memorable traffic control feature is the speed bump.  They are everywhere and often in series of two or three.  They are serious big humps that will destroy the suspension of an unwary driver.  After one-and-a-half years of driving, I hardly notice them anymore.  I just slow down subconsciously.

Since the road system has been constructed so quickly, there are relatively few cross streets. Sometimes you will drive past your destination on the wrong side of the median and are forced to drive fifteen or twenty kilometers to find a U-turn to change direction.  Being an aircraft pilot helps because it is necessary to "fly a pattern" by planning the correct routes to your destination.

To make driving more challenging, there are no street addresses in Dubai, which is a city of one-and-a-half million people.  Consequently, navigation is by landmarks.  The only city that I found more frustrating was Tokyo, which has street addresses but they are in chronological not numerical order.  Landmarks are a must there as well.

You may ask, why don't people just use GPS's?  Some have these miraculous little devices, but they are of little use here because the streets are so new or still under construction.  I have found that a road map and a dashboard-mounted compass to be the best system for navigation.

Sometimes I have to find places from "outer space".  I use Google Earth to determine the coordinates of my destination.  If the new place is in a totally unfamiliar area, I punch the latitude and longitude into my aviation GPS.  There are no streets in a flight GPS but the arrow still points to the destination.  I have successfully found my way to camel racetracks in the middle of the desert in the middle of the night with this method.

Every country has its driving challenges.  If you are not up to them in the Emirates, take a taxi.  They are very inexpensive.