Monday, April 07, 2008

Oops! Onto the Palm

Not for the first time I was confused by the road signs and ended up on Palm Jumeirah by mistake.

You can drive a couple of kilometres along the trunk, then you reach a security gate to the rest of the island which is a construction site. That's where you do a U-turn to get back to where you originally wanted to be.

Anyway, what I thought was interesting was after all the hype about the prime beachfront properties, people paying lots of money to live on the Palm, 'the most desired address in Dubai' and all that...it's just a bunch of apartment blocks on a main road. It'll be a very busy main road in the future too, with over 20,000 people trying to get along it every day.



10 comments:

i*maginate said...

I heard the finishing is atrocious too. At the end of the day...the market is still paying higher for this area...a lot to do with the marketing I'd say ;-)

LOL I got lost there too and there's no U-turn right til the end of the road and there's far too many humps!

Anonymous said...

I was in one of those apartments on the trunk of Palm Jumeirah a few weeks ago.
I went onto the balcony to see their "exclusive" beach belonging to these residents... I almost peed my pants with laughter: from 12:30pm onwards 90% of that exclusive beach is IN THE SHADE.

ginger and scotch said...

I thought the exact same thing last week when I drove into the Palm for the first time. I'm glad my husband picked the marina apartment for us.

Keef said...

We accidentally made the same trip a few weeks before we left Dubai. On the trunk, you have no sense of being on an island - you can't even see the sea!

i*maginate said...

P.S. seabee, I there's no luxury in living on the Palm if every T, D & H can get on it! I reckon it should be gated...have some kind of technology similar to Salik where residents don't need to wait to get in (unlike the Emirates Hills system), and guests have a separate entrance.

Seabee said...

It's going to be absolute chaos. One way in and out, thousands of residents plus hotel guests, tourists, and presumably they also want to attract shoppers and diners for all the restaurants.

Anonymous said...

Bearing in mind they got 43,000 workers on and off the island during the peak construction stage – I’m pretty sure visitors/hotel guests will be able to move around the island!

If you get time stop at one of the viewing pods on the Trunk - you'll soon realise your standing on an island.

Seabee said...

anon the workers were in buses each carrying sixty or seventy passengers, so less than 700 vehicles were involved.
The tourists, the residents, the shoppers, the diners aren't going to travel that way. There'll rarely be more than two people in a taxi or a Landcruiser.

Anonymous said...

Don't you think the 40,000 passengers carried per day on the Monorail will help??

Seabee said...

anon, of course the monorail will help - but you're not thinking it through. The number able to be carried is not the same as the number who will actually use it. And your 40,000 a day doesn't take account of the fact that most residents will need to travel at the same time, off the island in the morning peak and on again in the evening peak.
And the monorail stops at the mainland, the Metro is way across the other side of SZR.