I spent several days in Riyadh in October.1 I was particularly interested in riding Riyadh’s new Metro, all 176 kilometers of which opened in December 2024 and January 2025—an astonishingly quick opening of a substantial new system. I also wanted to visit an urban area of nearly eight million people where I’d never been.2
Some background, as usual, is in order. Unlike the big Gulf cities—Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Doha—with which it competes, Riyadh has a several-centuries-long history as an important place.3 The availability of some water and the city’s location at the junction of several trade routes assured Riyadh’s continued importance, as did its reputation as a center of religious learning. Riyadh remained a very traditional place as late as the early 1950s, when it was still a largely mud-brick, walled city only several hundred meters in diameter.
Oil started flowing on a large scale in eastern Saudi Arabia in the mid-1950s, and Riyadh began what are now seven decades of rapid growth. The walls of the old city were torn down, and the city slowly began to spread out and to acquire some modern features. But, even in the 1970s, it was still full of mud-brick buildings and occupied something like five percent of the space that the contemporary city covers. The Riyadh described in an excellent 1977 book by German urban geographer Heinz Pape had very little in common with the city of today.4
In 1971, the well-known Greek urbanist Constantinos Doxiadis was hired to plan a new large city. Doxiadis proposed a grid made up of huge 2-km-x-2-km blocks, and that’s more or less the pattern that’s been followed ever since, even as the city has grown into an enormous place stretching something like 60 km north-south and 40 km east-west.5
Doxiadis envisioned a city in which most movement would take place by automobile. There was little public transportation except taxis in Doxiadis’ Riyadh. The arterial roads and freeways that ran along the block borders were wide and typically did not have sidewalks that could easily be used for travelling very far. Shop owners did sometimes provide sidewalks that allowed movement between cars and shops, but there was no attempt to standardize these, so even moving between adjacent buildings could be awkward. This is still the pattern in much of Riyadh. Walking along streets involves passing through numerous parking lots and/or encountering a substantial number of stairs and level changes.
Street corner along Musa Ibn Nusair Street in central Riyadh. Where is a pedestrian supposed to go?
But not everyone had access to a car in Doxiadis’ Riyadh. Immigrants from the countryside were often too poor to buy a car, and, as time went on, more and more of the population came to be made up of foreign immigrant workers. These days, it seems likely that more than half the inhabitants of Riyadh—several million people—are foreign immigrants.6 Many of these are professionals who are paid quite well, but most foreign immigrants have modest jobs, and they’re often not paid well at all. These immigrant workers—most from South Asia but many from other places including the Philippines and the poorer Arab countries—typically do not own cars and are potential users of public transportation.
In recent years, Saudi Arabian governments have been obsessed with planning for a world in which Saudi oil is much less central to the economy. Much of this planning is summed up in the label “Vision 2030.” Vision 2030 involves a complicated effort to modernize many aspects of Saudi Arabian life. It includes plans for changes in the status of women, the role of work in citizens’ lives, the position of Saudi Arabia in the world—and the geography of cities.
With respect to cities, Vision 2030 implicitly proposes a reduced role for the automobile—and better public transportation—in Saudi Arabian urban areas.7 There’s been, for example, a major effort in Riyadh to install usable sidewalks in certain parts of the city. Some of the original work here was done on Tahlia Street. This is a major east-west street that passes through the Olaya neighborhood, an area in Riyadh where many of the landmarks of the contemporary city—the Kingdom and Faisaliyah Towers, for example—have been built. Conveniently, Tahlia Street happened to be wider than it needed to be. The dream was to create something like the Champs-Élysées, a street that that would attract both tourists and locals. Wide, flat sidewalks with attractive street furniture were indeed installed on Tahlia Street in the first decade of the 21st century, and parking lots right next to buildings were eliminated. Numerous shops, restaurants, and cafés opened. The first time I visited I was disappointed to find that there were hardly any pedestrians on the street, and the restaurants seemed deserted. It took a couple of days to realize that Riyadh—maybe more than anyplace else in the world—is a city where, if they have a choice, people do not leave their homes until late in the afternoon. The street does become a little livelier at sundown and even more bustling in mid-evening.
Tahlia Street at dusk.
On a world scale, there is nothing particularly remarkable about Tahlia Street (I don’t think it ever becomes as busy as, for example, the Champs-Élysées), but, in Riyadh, a public space where people of all classes, genders, and nationalities were encouraged to mix was apparently quite startling. The street was considered to be a success, and, as the Metro was built along Olaya Street, several kilometers of reasonably high-quality sidewalks were installed there as well. This part of Riyadh is now fairly “walkable.” The sidewalks are still pretty empty for most of the day, but, in the late afternoon and evening, native Saudis can be found walking along them. These sidewalks are not perfect. Dangerous detours for construction are startlingly common.
Construction blocking the sidewalk along Olaya Street,
And, since drivers (despite what the law says) do not feel they have to defer to pedestrians when they’re making a turn or emerging from an off-street parking area, pedestrians do have to be very careful.
An alternative to walking on the sidewalks is walking in parks. But Riyadh, for a city of its size, at present has hardly any parks, and they’re shockingly unavailable. It was recommended that I check out King Abdullah Park and Salam Park, both in older neighborhoods in south-central Riyadh. Both parks are surrounded by formidable fences, and both charge an admission fee (11.5 riyals (3.06 USD) and 5.75 riyals (1.53 USD) respectively). Both are open only for limited hours, King Abdullah Park between 1300 and 2400 and Salam Park between 1600 and 2400. The two times I visited King Abdullah Park, however, it was closed even though it wasn’t supposed to be. There were a small number of people walking around the 2.5-km walking path that circles the park’s perimeter. I was told that there are normally more users in the early evening.
The walking path around the perimeter of King Abdullah Park. The sign says that we’re at 1950 m.
Let me add that much larger King Salman Park, which will be built where the old airport was, is under construction (it’s the light green area on the map below). This park will be enormous, one of the world’s largest urban parks. But it’s not open yet.
The new Metro is the most important (and expensive) component of the effort to reduce the role of the automobile in cities. It’s at the core of Vision 2030’s plans. One of the reasons the government has put so much effort into sidewalks is that officials wanted to make sure that people could get to Metro stations.8
The Metro covers nearly the whole urban area with a kind of grid. Here’s a map:
Map of Riyadh emphasizing rail transit lines. Pedestrian facilities are shown too. The nominal scale of the map is 1:200,000. That’s the scale it would have if printed on an 11-x-11-inch sheet of paper. GIS data are mostly derived from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap. I’ve edited some of the data. The light-rail line in the northeast serves the women’s Princess Nourah University and apparently may be used only by women. Click on the map to enlarge it.
The Metro is the world’s longest driverless metro. The system takes full advantage of driverless technology. Trains come frequently (at least every six minutes or so) even in off hours, and they’re short, four cars long on the main north-south Blue Line in west-central Riyadh, two cars long elsewhere. (All the stations were built for four-car trains, however.)
Oncoming four-car train on the Blue Line in southern Riyadh. As in most of the urban area, almost all the buildings in working-class southern Riyadh have only one, two, or three stories. Skyscrapers are generally confined to the new city center along Olaya Street and in the high-prestige northwestern parts of the city.
Trains and stations are equipped with the latest in electric signage. Signs (and announcements) in Arabic and English provide next-station and final-destination information. Stations all have countdown clocks.
I rode nearly the whole system when I was in Riyadh. My general impression is that it’s one of the world’s most luxurious metros.9 It feels as though no one was too worried about expenses when it was being constructed. Nearly half the system is underground, in some places far underground. All the central-city underground stations have several exits, each equipped with an elevator and many with escalators as well.10
Escalators at (I think) the National Museum station.
Stations where two or more lines come together were in several cases designed by starchitects and are particularly extravagant. The above-ground station at the King Abdullah Financial District (KAFD), for example, was designed by Zaha Hadid Associates and looks like no other metro station in the world.
The elevated Metro station at the King Abdullah Financial District (KAFD). Some of the District’s dozens of skyscrapers are also visible.
The KAFD station feeds into a series of above-ground walkways that take passengers throughout the District.11
Walkway between the KAFD Metro station and the King Abdullah Financial District.
There will soon be a 3.6-km-long monorail as well for those who’d rather not walk.
The underground station at Qasr al Hokm was designed by the Norwegian firm Snøhetta. It appears to sit under what looks like a flying saucer. This is mostly a design feature, but it does have the advantage of allowing access to the upper mezzanine without having to use stairs, an elevator, or an escalator.
The Qasr al Hokm station entranceway.
Below ground, there is plenty of artificial and natural light.
Waiting for a train at the Qasr al Hokm station. Note the natural light at the right and the designed light panels on the left.
As in Dubai and Qatar, the trains have three classes. There’s a first class; a “family” section chiefly for women; and a zone for everyone else (euphemistically labelled “singles” in English, “individuals” [afrād أفراد] in Arabic). The latter class can be very crowded, especially on the lines with only two cars. It appears that at least half of the passengers in this last class are usually foreign workers, although (if dress is any indication) Saudi men ride here too.12
Inside the section for “individuals” on a Blue Line train. This car is much less crowded than usual.
Fares are pretty reasonable. Regular tickets cost 4 riyals (1.07 USD). First-class tickets are 10 riyals (2.67 USD). Tickets are valid for two hours and can be used to extend trips on buses. Three-day and one-week passes (at 20 and 40 riyals respectively) are also available.
The Metro is said to have an eventual capacity of 3.6 million people a day. The figure presumably supposes the use of four-car trains on all the lines and lowered headways between trains. Current ridership is way below that. There were 25.2 million passengers in the third quarter of 2025.13 By my calculations, that means that there were 280,000 riders a day, less than a tenth of the eventual theoretical capacity. I don’t know whether the passenger loads are disappointing to the authorities. Saudi newspapers, or those published in English anyway, do not appear ever to suggest that there might be a problem, and I wasn’t in a position to ask anyone about this.
The construction of the Metro has been accompanied by the establishment of new bus lines, including three BRT lines. Bus stops are often air-conditioned and sometimes feature countdown clocks.
Air-conditioned bus stop on Olaya Street with next-arrival sign.
It’s arguable that there’s never been a case in which a car-dependent urban area has been converted into an urban area in which cars become a significantly less important way to get around. One reason for this is that, in car-oriented cities, it’s not easy to get to new rail stations on foot or by transit. The fact that metro-building in Riyadh was accompanied by sidewalk construction and improvements in the bus system is certainly a sign that the system’s planners understood what needed to be done. Only time will tell whether they’ll actually succeed.
- I’ve tended (reluctantly!) to accept the traditional English-language spellings of Arabic names in this post, even though many of them suggest a pronunciation that is just wrong. “Riyadh” is a case in point. The Library of Congress and many scholarly journals would prefer to Romanize the city’s name (الرياض) as al-Riyāḍ. Like many Arabic place names, Riyāḍ needs an article, and the final “d” (ﺽ) is usually a pharyngealized voiced alveolar stop. That is, it’s neither a regular “d” nor the voiced “th” of “the” in English that the spelling might suggest.
- It used to be difficult to get a Saudi visa for a casual visit. I did manage to spend a couple of days in Jiddah in 1974 (between the two academic years that I spent teaching at the University of Khartoum). The visa application form in 1974 included numerous rather intrusive questions (about my religion, for example). I got the visa only because I could claim (accurately) that I was in transit between Sana and Amman. Presumably to make sure that I’d actually leave, my passport was held at the airport. Under Vision 2030, tourist visas are now easy to come by, but expensive.
- See, for example, the following excellent book: William Facey, Riyadh : the old city from its origins until the 1950s (London : Immel Publishing, 1992) for an account of Riyadh’s formidably complicated history. Many pages are devoted to Riyadh’s gradual transformation in the 20th century from a tiny medieval place into one with, well, at least a few elements of modernity.
- See: Heinz Pape, Er Riad : Stadtgeographie und Stadtkartographie der Hauptstadt Saudi-Arabiens (Paderborn : Ferdinand Schöningh, 1977) (Bochumer Geographische Arbeiten ; Sonderreihe Band 7).
- Much of my knowledge of the near-contemporary history of Riyadh comes from recent reading. See especially: Yasser Elsheshtawy, Riyadh : transforming a desert city (London : Routledge, 2022), which, unlike many books about cities, deals at length with the recent shifts in transportation planning. It was published before the Metro’s opening, however.
- Note, though, that foreign immigrants make up a smaller percentage of the population than in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Doha, Manama, and Kuwait. Saudi Arabia, of course, unlike the tiny states on the Gulf, has a substantial “native” population.
- I’m following Elsheshtawy here (citation in footnote 5 above). See, in particular, pages 147-205.
- Something not even considered in many places. See my posts on Delhi, Jakarta, and Dallas.
- There are various estimates of the Metro’s cost. A figure of 22.5 billion U.S. dollars was given in Railway Technology in 2023. I haven’t been able to find an updated figure.
- Given the difficulties of crossing streets on foot in Riyadh, this is a particularly useful feature. It’s possible to use the Metro stations to cross many streets without paying a fare. You just have to be willing to wait twice for an elevator or to trudge up and down two flights of stairs if there’s no escalator.
- Riyadh’s older skyscrapers, as is common in automobile-oriented cities, are somewhat spread out. KAFD, which will consist of 94 (!) LEED-certified skyscrapers, was self-consciously designed to be a walkable place, with buildings close together. The photograph just below, taken in the lobby of an office building, shows a schematic view of KAFD.
- I acknowledge that dress and facial features are an imperfect guide to ethnicity. Re the photograph: the correspondence required for getting an e-visa to visit Saudi Arabia included a warning about respecting Saudi customs. Visa holders are told not to take pictures of people without their permission. Thus, I felt shyer than usual about photographing the normally crowded interior of a Metro car’s “individuals” section, even with an iPhone.
- Figure is from the Riyadh daily.
