The road situation in Dubai is difficult to fathom and even more difficult to explain. Just today I was coming home from work and I hit not one but two construction-related changes on Sheikh Zayed Road.
The first is this genius technique they have here of closing a middle lane of the freeway without any warning. They do this temporarily when they're building an overpass (what the Brits would term a "flyover") and they need construction support in the middle of five lanes. That's fine, I'm not making a case against physics or good construction - but the 'without warning' part is the kicker. You're just driving along when BOOM - yellow lines up ahead, construction cones and swerving Mercedeses.
The second change in my normal route was the end of construction on the off-ramp from Sheikh Zayed Road to the Media City area where we live. Several lanes of Sheikh Zayed are now open, which is an amazement.
But the best driving story I have is from yesterday morning, about 7:45 am. I had to run to a friend's office to color print out our final project for school (which I was up working on until well after 1 am the night before). I was driving home from the Ibn Battuta Mall area. Liz and I joke that on every trip there we have to either take a different route on the way or coming home. Next time we go we have a fifty-fifty chance that the way there or back will be different than the last time we went.
Anyway, at the crack of dawn yesterday I'm bleary-eyed driving home when the off-ramp I usually take is closed, and there's a new overpass open.
I'm about mid-way on it, when I realize that it's the overpass to nowhere!
I first talked about this back in August (see Hard Rock Adventure) - they were building the middle section of an overpass without a ramp up or down, it was just plain weird.
The oddest part is that you can see part of the overpass from our living room window, so now every once and a while out of the corner of your eye you see movement where there used to be none.
I just ran out and took this photo from down the street, you'll see the cement mixer up on the road:
I guess that overpass to nowhere is now an overpass to somewhere!
