Khalaf Al-Harbe Okaz The Riyadh Metro project has turned the capital city upside down. It has further complicated its already confusing map. You will not know now if this street is heading north or south. You follow the cars in front of you blindly just to make sure that you are not going into oncoming traffic or entering a dead end. You try your level best to avoid the numerous bumps on the street while also focusing on not returning to the point where you have started. Nobody can now claim that he or she is a good guide for Riyadh and that they know every corner of the city. The limousine drivers, who used to know every place in Riyadh, are now also puzzled. You ask one of them to take you to a shop selling ful (a type of beans) and you will find yourself getting down in front of a police station. You take your family to go to a shopping mall and you will find yourself circling the offices of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. You stop at a place you know very well is a car park and suddenly you will discover that you are parking on an express road. The worse case scenario that can happen to Riyadh is the delay in the execution of its metro project. The residents now feel seasickness though they are not near a sea. This is because the project has closed a number of streets or changed their directions. Getting to a certain place has become impossible unless you are parachuting. All this can be bearable and dealt with if the project is completed on time. It will then relieve the heavy traffic and make traveling through the city a possible task. If, God forbid, the project has joined the whirlpool of faltering or delayed projects, the consequences will be tremendously bad. They will go beyond financial and development losses to cause innumerable social problems. A motorist in Riyadh may easily lose a dear friend who is accompanying him in the car. The friend may make the mistake of suggesting to the driver to turn right only to find himself in a dead street from which he cannot turn back. The man on the wheel may be extremely exasperated by his friend to the point of completely losing him and sacrificing his friendship. If the metro project is delayed, the divorce rate may increase. The continuous nagging of the wives may cause the husbands to lose direction while they are doing their best to know where they are going. The result may be an irreconcilable separation. I believe that it is the duty of the parties responsible for the implementation of this gigantic project to announce to us when it will be completed exactly. They should provide us with the details of each phase and informing us about the stages it has reached. The project is not a joke and its timely execution is a national duty. If it was in my hands, I would set up a special TV channel to show us what is exactly going on with the project, step by step. The channel will conduct live interviews with the workers to explain to us what have they dug and what have they buried so far. The workers will tell us how many hours they work daily, what is left for them to do and when they will move to the next phase. This project has divided Riyadh into a number of separate towns and villages. It has made contact among them an enigma. Therefore, giving the public continuous information about what is happening on the metro project is a matter of extreme importance. Riyadh residents should know when their metro project will be competed so they stop losing their way in the cosmopolitan and crowded city with unclear roads and passes.
