RTA Dubai · GTFS schedule analysis

Is Dubai’s transit keeping up?

Traffic and crowding are getting harder to ignore. Here’s what Dubai’s own published Metro and Bus schedule says about which areas are actually well served.

2,847
Stops
259
Routes
24k
Daily trips
4 min
Best metro headway
The finding
31x

International City & Al Warqaa gets 31x less scheduled peak-hour transit capacity than Satwa & Al Wasl, the best-served of Dubai’s 5 core fare zones.

The reason: International City & Al Warqaa has zero Metro stops and runs on buses alone.

Peak-hour capacity, per stop
International City &
Al Warqaa
447
Bus only
Satwa &
Al Wasl
13,831
Metro + Bus

“Peak” means the morning and evening commute windows, 7–9am and 5–7pm. Estimated riders/hour a stop’s scheduled service can carry in that window: 80 per bus × trips/hour, 670 per 5-car Metro train × trips/hour. Not measured ridership — GTFS is a published schedule, not a live passenger count.

All 5 zones, ranked
International City & Al Warqaa447
JVC & Arabian Ranches5,296
Al Quoz & Al Barsha 310,763
Muhaisnah 2 & Al Nahda 112,546
Satwa & Al Wasl13,831
Getting to Dubai’s job hubs

For each fare zone and job hub: how many riders/hour a direct (no-transfer) Bus/Metro ride can carry during peak commute hours (7–9am and 5–7pm), summing every route that connects them. Tap a cell for the route breakdown — a dash means no single shared route was found, not that it’s unreachable.

Methodology

Built from RTA Dubai’s public GTFS feed (GTFS_20260228 (RTA Dubai)) — 1.7M+ scheduled stop-time records parsed into fare-zone and hourly aggregates. Peak-hour capacity is scheduled trip frequency × an assumed vehicle size, not measured ridership. The zone-to-hub matrix uses the same method, summed across every route that directly connects a zone to a hub with no transfer.

Sources

RTA Dubai public GTFS feed, GTFS_20260228 (RTA Dubai).