Bus shelter blues: Abu Dhabi's public transport roll-out bogs down

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Time was - three years ago, to be precise - my local Abu Dhabi bus shelter was a rustic affair.

Its cement pillars and partial plaster-board siding supported a double-domed plastic roof that cast shade. Otherwise, the shelter was open to the breeze. Its wooden slat benches let one take a load off without searing the flesh, and it was easy enough for street cleaners to sweep out cigarette butts and discarded betel wads.

Today there is a shiny new bus shelter in front of the shiny new petrol station that has sprung up behind it, supplanting the shade trees that used to grow there. It all looks very modern, functional and clean, but appearances can be deceiving. On closer inspection, this shelter represents in miniature much of what ails the capital's stop-and-go public transit system.

The bus shelter, formerly well patronised, pre-dates the petrol station at the Muroor Road site in front of the city's police college. It appeared suddenly one week in early 2009, seemingly overnight, fully formed and almost fully finished, except for an assortment of cables and wires that dangled from its ceiling.

As it was still winter, the enclosed plexiglass shelter with its shiny metal seats became a popular rest spot for labourers on smoke breaks. Unfortunately, the local street sweepers didn't regard the interior as an integral part of the area they were supposed to keep clean, so it soon came to resemble a giant ashtray.

"Oh well," the rest of us muttered, "I'm sure they'll hook up the air-conditioning by summer, and then they'll clean the place up and enforce the no smoking rule."

But summer came and went with no sign of the promised A/C. The labourers vacated the shelter as it turned into a perfect little broiler oven equipped with individual griddle pans for roasting insufficiently protected derrieres.

With the onset of the following winter, wires still dangled from the shelter's roof. Shortly thereafter, construction started on a site that had been cleared and fenced off behind it. Adnoc (Abu Dhabi National Oil Company) posters appeared, proclaiming that this would be a new petrol station.

Some months later, as the outlines of the forecourt emerged, the bus stop was closed off to allow construction of entry and exit ramps for the petrol station. Thus passed another summer and winter.

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Recently, the Police College bus stop was re-opened. The interior has been cleaned up, dangling wires are no longer visible, and no one is using the place as a smoking lounge.

But no one is using it for much of anything else - certainly not to wait comfortably for the bus.

Occasionally one might spot a couple of hapless commuters trying to squeeze themselves into a few square feet of shade behind the shelter, which still has not the slightest hint of A/C. Only the curious brave the stifling interior, but not for long.

Nor is this bus shelter particularly easy for pedestrians to access. It has a big sign advertising space to park a wheel-chair, but how would one get a wheel chair in there? Traversing queues of honking cars impatient to slurp up petrol and then the sand pits that masquerade as pavements is hard enough for the fully ambulatory.

So this bus shelter stands unloved and unused, a waste of public money, while the spanking new petrol station attracts a steady stream of single-occupant SUVs and sports cars for their weekly subsidised petrol fills.

Did it have to be this way? Not if city authorities had followed through on the plans they long ago announced to roll out infrastructure to make public transport an attractive option, and had not got bogged down part way through the execution phase.

In the time it takes to build an entire new Adnoc petrol station, the City of Abu Dhabi cannot put the finishing touches to a bus shelter?

But is that not to be expected of a jurisdiction that fast-tracks the development of a Formula-1 race-track and a Ferari sports-car oriented theme park, while its clean-tech ambitions have moved slowly ahead?

I hope I will be proved wrong and that the problems with my local bus shelter will soon be resolved. But for the moment, the message seems clear: the almighty motor car is once again being given a higher priority in this city than energy efficiency and decent public transport.