Getting around Dubai: the metro, the tram, taxis and the Nol card

Metro and tram

Two metro lines: the Red Line along the coast-parallel highway, and the Green Line through Deira and Bur Dubai. Between them they cover the airport, the souks, Downtown, Business Bay and the Marina. Trains are frequent, clean, air-conditioned and cheap, and there are women-and-children carriages as well as a paid Gold class.

The tram loops through the Marina and JBR and connects to the Red Line, which is how you reach the beach districts. It is slower than it looks on the map but it beats a taxi in traffic.

The Nol card

You cannot pay a metro or tram fare without a Nol card, so buying one is the first transport step. The standard red paper ticket works for a small number of trips; the blue and silver cards are rechargeable and make more sense for anything beyond a day. The same card works on buses and the water bus.

Fares are zone-based and low. Even a long run across the city costs a few dirhams, which is why the metro is almost always the right answer where it goes.

Taxis, apps and rental cars

Metered taxis are plentiful, cheap by international standards and easy to hail. The ride-hailing apps operate here too, and cost slightly more than a street taxi for the same trip in exchange for not having to find one.

Renting a car adds parking, tolls and the Salik gate charges, and puts you in traffic that the metro avoids entirely. For a three-day city itinerary it is a false economy; for a trip that leaves the city it is close to essential.

Airport routes and the trips the metro does not cover

A handful of journeys account for most visitor transport. Airport to Downtown is the Red Line in about twenty minutes from Terminal 1 or 3. Airport to the Marina or JBR is the Red Line plus the tram, closer to an hour, or a taxi in thirty to forty minutes. Downtown to the Marina is the Red Line end to end. And anywhere to Palm Jumeirah is a taxi, because there is no metro on the island.

The gaps in the network are consistent: Palm Jumeirah, the Jumeirah beach strip, Al Quoz and anywhere off the main highway corridor. For those, taxis are cheap enough that a car is rarely worth the parking and the tolls.

Salik is the road toll system, charged automatically at gantries on the main roads. It matters only if you are driving a rental, in which case the charges are billed through the hire company afterwards.

Route by route

Six journeys with their own page, because the right answer differs on each one and the difference is not obvious from a map.

From the airport: to Downtown, where the metro genuinely competes with a taxi; to Dubai Marina and JBR, where it stops competing; to Palm Jumeirah, where it gives up altogether; and to Deira, the shortest and cheapest transfer in the city at around ten minutes.

Between districts: Downtown to Dubai Marina, the trip most visitors make several times and the one where evening traffic changes the answer; and Downtown to Palm Jumeirah, which is a taxi for the same reason the airport run is.

Step-free travel

The metro is fully step-free, with lifts at every station, level boarding onto the trains and dedicated spaces in the carriages. The tram is the same. Between them they cover most of the routes a visitor needs, which makes Dubai one of the easier Gulf cities to move around in a wheelchair or with a pram.

The weak point is the last few hundred metres. Station exits are often on the far side of a wide road, and the covered walkways that solve that exist only at the biggest stations.