Blog 9: Qatar Rail and Qatar Vision 2030

Welcome again to my blog!

In July 2008, Shaikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani has established this vision that aims to make Qatar by 2030 a developed country, and to provide high standards of living for its people.  This aim will be established throughout four main pillars of that vision, which are: human, social, economic, and environmental development. 

What I would like to introduce you to in this blog is a small report which I and two of my colleagues wrote about the environmental pillar, especially about one of the most important urban projects in Qatar, which is Qatar Rail. 
We talked about Rail's advantages, challenges, and made some recommendations. 

Advantages:

Rail will help in population distribution between different regions in Qatar. Rail is designed to match between areas with a high population and the outlying areas where the distribution is sparing. For example, the green line runs from Al Riffa to Al Mansoura. Additionally, Rail provides quick transport from areas with a high population to the newly developed areas, such as Lusal. 
Another advantage of Rail is it's compliant with the international standards and maintains the ISO 14001:2004 certification. This certificate shows that Qatar Rail has prioritized the environment and it will continue to maintain the highest of standards to improve its environmental performance. Rail will help to improve the air quality by working with electricity.

The third advantage which we included in our report is that Rail will be environmentally friendly. Rail will help to decrease the negative gases such as Carbon Dioxide, which are produced by cars. It is expected that 17000 cars will not be used by 2030. Thus, 107000 Kg of the emitted Carbon gases from the cars will disappear from the atmosphere.

We also talked about the challenges Rail may face in the future:

 Challenge one: 

Rail has three lines and 40 stations. The Red line runs from Al Wakra in the south to Lusail in the north, and there are 18 stations along this line. The second is the Green line. It starts from Al Riffa in the east to Al Mansoura in the west, and there are 11 stations along this line. The final one is the Gold line which runs from Ras Bu Aboud to Al Aziziya. This huge number of lines and stations requires considerable efforts to ensure the safe and high-quality usage of these stations and lines, especially that it has the ISO certification of Rail high performance. 

 

Challenge two:

The importance of social class makes Qatarisvery elitist in their views of using Rail. They prefer to use their personal fancy car instead of using public transportations. It is highly expected that Rail will be used the most by expatriates and migrant workers. Thus, it will be very difficult to make Qataris break their cultural and social boundaries and convince them to use Rail. 


We recommended that Qatar can encourage its people to use Rail by transforming some stations into art galleries. Also, many promotional campaigns should be conducted about Rail, like Adv, TV shows, and exhibitions. 

I hope you enjoyed this blog.

Till the next one.

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