Dubai Gets A Metro

In case you haven’t heard, Dubai has a metro. The first line opens today, a small part of what may someday be a sizable system–at least, if the whole emirate doesn’t disappear into a pulsing black hole of debt in the meantime.

We looked about this project a few weeks ago and poked a little fun at it, because, really, it’s so hard not to laugh at Dubai. It’s the Segway of cities. But this metro is also a major accomplishment and does deserve some recognition on this, its inaugural day of service (for invited VIPs, anyway — the pleebs get to start riding tomorrow).

So, to quote Will Smith in his younger days, here’s the situation: For years Dubai has been leading a Michael Jacksonesque debt-fabulous lifestyle, borrowing more than $85 billion–double the emirate’s GDP–to finance a crazy building spree and associated lavishness. That figure doesn’t even include the $7 billion spent (so far) on the metro project. The local potentate, Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, is now in the position of gently deflecting rumors that the city-state will be unable to make good on debt obligations due later this year.

Financially profligate as it may be, this subway-in-the-desert is still an intriguing project. Dubai’s is the second metro system in the Arab world (Cairo has the other) and would seem to hold enormous benefits for that city’s enormous underclass, promising “far quicker commutes in a sprawling city-state where shared taxis, packed vans and creaky wooden boats are among the most visible forms of public transportation.” It will also be cheap, with a base fare of 50 cents. The project seems a rather bold egalitarian gesture, in fact, for a gilded Middle East sheikdom, and deserves recognition as such.

As an AP story notes (or quotes), the metro represents a “culture change” for Dubai. What makes it of broader interest is that Dubai is itself a kind of everycity — a patchwork quilt, with neighborhoods lifted whole cloth from Phoenix, Miami, New York, Mumbai, Orange County, and so on and on. In the digital age global culture characterized by compulsive imitation, borrowing, sampling and stealing, Dubai is a compelling laboratory for watching a broader, more global culture change in terms of how we think about and plan cities. (That is, an evolution beyond the post-war notion that the automotive travel should be the DNA of everything we build and toward something smarter and more elegant.)

That’s not to suggest that the metro will necessarily be a success in all respects or even that it will be completed. There are the expected absurd elements, of course, like the leather SUV-style luxury seats in the ritzy “Gold” cars. And then there’s the challenge of building a subway for a sprawling desert metropolis designed–a place that lacks even an inadequate sidewalk network. Will people walk in the street in 120-degree heat to ride the train? Will people take a cab to subway and then a cab to their destination? It’ll be interesting to see. Our guess is that there enough poor people in Dubai that ridership numbers will still be pretty robust, even if the car-owning classes aren’t completely won over. (We doubt, for instance, David Beckham will be hopping a ride.)

It will also be interesting to watch the sheikdom grapple with the financial challenges of project. They really do want this thing pay for itself–so much so that they’re selling off naming rights for many stations and even entire metro lines. Given the atrocious balance sheets of so many transit authorities and municipalities across the US, they may prove a trendsetter in that decision as in so many others.