DID you hear that sigh? Or was that a roar! One elaborate, collective breath released in a sigh of relief by residents of Sharjah, after the first phase of the vital Sharjah ring road opened to traffic yesterday. No more driving rings round, literally, the city roads to get in and out of Sharjah. Those working in Dubai and heading home to Sharjah are the happiest lot.
For a long, long time it looked like Sharjah would always give the impression of a city choked in traffic jams, and at bottlenecks. Especially for motorists travelling from Dubai to Sharjah, particularly those using the Al Ithihad Road, or those wishing to travel directly to other emirates from Sharjah. For them, the packed Sharjah city roads were roads strewn with hurdles, those of the four-wheel kind, everyone of those four-wheels stalled at bottlenecks like the one on Al Ithihad highway.
It was one tough grind. For a man with his office in, say, Al Quoz, he had to be up and out maybe three hours before he punched the card at his workplace. More than half of those nearly three hours spent memorising the numberplate of the car ahead of his car.