• Home

No more going around in circles

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.

Then the return trip, it is even worse. Get caught at the Al Ithihad highway bottleneck and you might as well kiss goodbye to plans. By the time you manage to squeeze through, it would be close to 10 in the night. The kids would have gone to bed and the food on the table would have gone cold.. No wonder just one phase of something like the Sharjah ring road opening has resulted in a sigh of relief.

• UAE