By
Qassim Sultan

The Director General
Dubai Municipality

Good Morning……. Ladies and Gentlemen!

It is my pleasure to announce the Dubai Municipality Address in the opening ceremony of this first leading conference for Middle East Transport and Urban Planning.

I highly recognize and appreciate the efforts of Messrs. IIR, PTRC and TRL in organizing such an important event, which brings together decision-makers and professional speakers in this field. I welcome you to Dubai, the City of Beauty and Culture.

Dubai city can be considered a medium size urban area with around 0.7 million population and around 4000 squared kilometers overall area. The Urban Area forms only around ten percent of the overall area. The city paved road network has grown from less than 200 km in 1964 to around 1700 km in 1998.

Dubai is a fast growing city which faces unique transportation and planning challenges due to the accelerated increase in population, travel and economic activities. To address these challenges properly, Dubai Municipality has undertaken necessary steps in Urban Transportation and planning fields. These steps include:

– Construction of new roads at an overall annual rate of around 150 km at Dhs. 500 million
– Improvement of existing roads and junctions
– Improvement of traffic and pedestrian circulation in CBD areas
– Implementation of an advanced Urban Traffic Control System (SCOOT)
– Implementation of parking control and management in CBD areas
– Development and implementation of advanced signing and plot numbering and addressing systems
– Development of comprehensive integrated transportation planning schemes and multi- modal transportation models
– Development and implementation of traffic impact assessment procedures and guidelines
– Improvement of public transport services
– Development of comprehensive GIS database, which will enable introducing different GIS-based transportation and planning applications.

The details of some of the above subjects will be presented to you by the Dubai Municipality Staff during this conference.

Ladies and Gentlemen…..

You are attending an important and comprehensive conference, which addresses wide variety of transportation issues and topics.

I wish you a great success in achieving your planned goals and in deriving fruitful results and conclusions that will certainly help in providing further tools to help us to improve our transportation systems.

I hope that this event will be the starting point for similar future activities in Dubai, the Premier Cultural, Financial, Industrial, Commercial, Tourism and Distribution Centre for the Gulf and the entire Middle East Region.

Once again, I express my best hopes for the organizers and attendees of this conference and hope you have a nice stay in Dubai.

Thank you!!