Dubai Loop: The 3-Minute Commute Between DIFC and Dubai Mall Is Coming

A 20-minute drive across town in three minutes flat — that’s the promise behind Dubai Loop, the underground transport network whose first four stations were just announced: Burj Khalifa, DIFC 2, Zabeel Dubai Mall Parking and ICD Brookfield Place.

Dubai Loop uses tunnelling and vehicle technology developed by The Boring Company, making Dubai only the second city in the world — after Las Vegas — to deploy it. Phase one covers 6.4 kilometres at a cost of Dh600 million and is expected to be complete within one to two years, moving up to 13,000 passengers a day using roughly 100 autonomous vehicles.

The full network, once built out, will span 24 kilometres across 19 stations at a total cost of Dh2.5 billion. Part of what makes the economics work is the tunnelling method itself — excavation runs around Dh70 million per kilometre, against roughly Dh125 million for conventional tunnelling.

Projects like this rarely stay confined to transport statistics for long. Every station location instantly becomes a proximity premium for the buildings around it — and DIFC, sitting at the centre of two of the four announced stops, is about to get considerably easier to reach from almost anywhere in the city.

Source of information: Khaleej Times