If you are an impatient person, driving on the roads of Makkah during Ramadan may not be a very good idea. Residents of the holy city are facing great difficulties driving on the crowded roads. Five reasons Road engineers, experts and senior traffic officers have attributed five reasons for traffic congestions. Firstly, Makkah has not seen any new road projects over the past 25 years. Secondly, there is a lack of effective public transportation network connecting Makkah districts with the Grand Mosque. Moreover the quality of some road designs is extremely poor; there are big malls without parking lots on both sides of the road. Finally, use of private cars to transport passengers to the Grand Mosque and lack of effective traffic planning alleviate traffic congestions. Jamal Bakr Hariri, former deputy mayor for services, attributed the cause of traffic congestions to lack of an effective public transportation system and a large number of vehicles. “Constructing new roads will cost the government huge amount of money and will not solve the traffic congestion problem. It is very important to expand the services of shuttle buses operating to and from the Grand Mosque,” he said. He added that the flow of traffic will be smoother upon completion of the projects currently being implemented in Makkah. Outdated road designs Dr. Muhammad Maslat Al-Shareef, Engineering professor at Umm Al-Qura University and an Adviser to the Commission for the Development of Makkah and the holy sites, blamed traffic congestions on the outdated design of the roads. “These roads were not designed to accommodate huge number of vehicles,” he said. Ring roads are not providing optimal benefits because they have not been completed yet; once the four ring roads will be completed, traffic flow will be more organized, Dr. Al-Shareef added. Planning reasons Reasonable solutions to solve traffic congestions were offered by Dr. Muhammad Idris, Deputy Director of Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques Institute for Haj Research (CTHMIHR). “A complete public transportation system should be designed and full-service parking lots should be constructed for Umrah pilgrims on the outskirts of Makkah, so they can park there and take a shuttle bus to Haram,” he said. The institute has conducted various studies on traffic flow and transportation and has made several recommendations such as designing a comprehensive plan and building a central station for public transportation in the city, Dr. Idris added. “What we need to do now is to find radical solutions to this problem in light of King Abdullah's support for development projects in Makkah,” he said. Transportation needs Dr. Osama Fadl Al-Bar, Mayor of Makkah, said: “The increasing number of pilgrims causes traffic congestion, which in turn causes air and noise pollution, due to the long waiting hours in traffic jams. Although Makkah has six main entrances, Jeddah and Al-Sail highways reduce half the traffic congestion to and from Makkah. This means that we need more ring roads to distribute traffic to different roads and prevent vehicles outside the city from using internal roads, thus reducing traffic congestion.” Every year, the mayoralty completes new phases of the project of the fourth ring road, which will reduce traffic congestions inside the city, Dr. Al-Bar added. The mayoralty has completed a study to construct its own internal train network, which will cost SR8 billion. “Al-Haramain Train Project will be ready in 2012 and Makkah will need an internal train network to be connected with Al-Haramain Train Project,” Dr. Al-Bar said.
