When I tell someone who’s not been to Riyadh that I grew up in Riyadh, they sometimes say something along the lines of “Oh, a genuinely big and rich city”. Riyadh always had a reputation in the region for its big size and spacious streets. From early on, Riyadh freeways were modeled after U.S. freeways. Those were the days when Saudis and Americans were real “friends”. Today, however, Saudis are smart and educated. They can build their own roads — or so they thought.
One can clearly see the stupidity of Riyadh designers in how they build roads. The obvious common sense oversights they make are too many to count. They fail to mark pedestrian crossings, lanes, and road shoulders, yet they wonder why Saudi drivers don’t obey traffic rules. And they blame their failures on the nature of disobedient drivers.
Because of this, driving in Riyadh is hectic and unpredictable. You don’t know where to expect a curb, an unmarked speed bump or what lane you’re in. Combined with Riyadh’s big roads and speeding drivers, this used to be a fatally dangerous issue. Thankfully, with today’s gridlocked traffic, this is no longer a problem. You can’t speed past 60Kmph before the traffic light turns red or you get stuck in another traffic jam.
Poor roads design is not the only reason traffic in Riyadh sucks. There’s also the working hours of shops and malls. Here’s the working hours of a shop in Riyadh on a typical weekday:
- 9am-11:45am
- 4pm-6pm
- 7pm-7:45pm
- 8:30pm-10pm
In a day, a single shop closes and opens 4 times. The first break period is the siesta/prayer time. The next three breaks are all mandatory by law for prayers. Salaried employees obviously love these breaks because they get to go have a smoke and chill out, so they’re eager to close and slow to open after the break. What’s worse is that prayer times follow the sun, so working hours change every day!
This contributes to bad traffic in several ways:
1) Folks are forced out of buildings and into the streets during prayer times.
2) Drivers rush like mad to catch stores before they close for the next prayer break.
3) Shoppers prefer to go out after 8PM because it’s the longest working hours window without interruptions (excluding the morning period when everyone is either sleeping or at work. Morning period is the least busy, by the way). In normal cities, 8PM is the time by which most rush hour traffic has disappeared. In whacky Riyadh, it’s the busiest and most crowded time of the day.
Add to that the fact that Riyadh is condensing with people. It’s the only city in Saudi Arabia with proper infrastructure, business environment and services. So families from all over Saudi are flocking to Riyadh. And how does the government of Riaydh react and proact? Well, they don’t. They’re busy installing new fancy lights in King Abdullah street. To be fair, they’re actually also building new areas and neighborhoods. But those are of even lower quality than the current torn down parts of Riyadh. Those new areas are as if they were built by first timers with very little experience.
All in all, when it comes to traffic, to say that Riyadh is shit is an insult to shit (especially the healthy kind of it). But most people don’t know any better. They just go about their lives.